Theological Anthropology in Interreligious Perspective (Sapientia Islamica, 5) 9783161617775, 9783161617782, 3161617770

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration and Dates
Tim Winter — Introduction
Part I: Created in the Image: Human Wholeness
Christoph Schwöbel — ‘Theology … defines the whole and complete and perfect human being.’ Being Human in the Dispute between Theology and Philosophy: Variations on a Christian, Muslim and Jewish Theme
Recep Şentürk — Multiplex Human Ontology and Multiplex Self: An Alternative Understanding of Human Behaviour
Part II: Death and Human Becoming
Ivana Noble — Created to Be and to Become Human: A Christian Perspective
Lejla Demiri — ‘He Who has created death and life’ (Q 67:2): Death in Islamic Theology and Spirituality
Part III: Belief and Devotion
Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino — ‘The Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves’ (Q 33:6): A Scriptural Inquiry into the Anthropological Foundation of the Ittibāᶜ al-Nabī (Sequela Prophetae)
Amina Nawaz — Mutual Influences of Christian and Muslim Anthropologies in History: A Case Study of Sixteenth-Century Morisco Devotions
Part IV: The Child in Human Becoming
Friedrich Schweitzer — The Anthropology of the Child: Opportunities and Challenges for a Neglected Topic in Christian-Muslim Dialogue
Mujadad Zaman — Children in the Medieval Islamic Imagination: A Path Towards Pedagogic Dialogue
Part V: Dignity and Sinfulness
Daniel A. Madigan SJ — ‘These people have no grasp of God’s true measure’ (Q 39:67): Does the Doctrine of Original Sin do Justice to God and to Humanity?
Ralf K. Wüstenberg — The ‘Fall’ of Mankind: Structural Parallels between the Narratives of Sin in Christianity and Islam
Part VI: Limits to Being, Limits to Naming God
Simone Dario Nardella — God, Man, Being: ᶜAbd al-Ghanī-al-Nābulusī’s Explanation of the Intellect’s Capacity to Know God in al-Wujūd al-ῌaqq
Paul-A. Hardy — On Naming and Silencing
Conor Cunningham — Thomas Aquinas’ Anthropology: Stuck in the Middle with You
Part VII: Futures
Michael Kirwan SJ and Ahmad Achtar — ‘The wound where light enters’: A ‘Common Word’ for Being Human in Islam and Christianity
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Sapientia Islamica Studies in Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism Edited by Lejla Demiri (Tübingen) Samuela Pagani (Lecce) Sohaira Z. Siddiqui (Doha) Editorial Board Ahmed El Shamsy, Angelika Neuwirth, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Dan Madigan, Frank Griffel, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Olga Lizzini, Rotraud Hansberger, and Tim J. Winter

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Theological Anthropology in Interreligious Perspective Edited by

Lejla Demiri, Mujadad Zaman, Tim Winter, Christoph Schwöbel, and Alexei Bodrov

Mohr Siebeck

Lejla Demiri, born 1975; Professor of Islamic Doctrine at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen (Germany). Mujadad Zaman, born 1982; Research Fellow at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen (Germany). Tim Winter, born 1960; Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College. Christoph Schwöbel (1955–2021), held the 1643 Chair in Divinity at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. Alexei Bodrov, born 1960; Rector of St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute, Editor in Chief of St. Andrew’s Institute Press (Moscow) and Researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam.

ISBN 978-3-16-161777-5 / eISBN 978-3-16-161778-2 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-161778-2 ISSN 2625-672X / eISSN 2625-6738 (Sapientia Islamica) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. ©  2022 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany.  www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer using Minion typeface, printed on non-aging paper by Gulde Druck in Tübingen, and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

In memoriam Christoph Schwöbel 19 February 1955–18 September 2021 Paul Hardy 5 December 1944–6 April 2022

Table of Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI Note on Transliteration and Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X III Tim Winter Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part I: Created in the Image: Human Wholeness Christoph Schwöbel ‘Theology … defines the whole and complete and perfect human being.’ Being Human in the Dispute between Theology and Philosophy: Variations on a Christian, Muslim and Jewish Theme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Recep Şentürk Multiplex Human Ontology and Multiplex Self: An Alternative Understanding of Human Behaviour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Part II: Death and Human Becoming Ivana Noble Created to Be and to Become Human: A Christian Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Lejla Demiri ‘He Who has created death and life’ (Q 67:2): Death in Islamic Theology and Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

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Part III: Belief and Devotion Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino ‘The Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves’ (Q 33:6): A Scriptural Inquiry into the Anthropological Foundation of the Ittibāʿ al-Nabī (Sequela Prophetae) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Amina Nawaz Mutual Influences of Christian and Muslim Anthropologies in History: A Case Study of Sixteenth-Century Morisco Devotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

Part IV: The Child in Human Becoming Friedrich Schweitzer The Anthropology of the Child: Opportunities and Challenges for a Neglected Topic in Christian-Muslim Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Mujadad Zaman Children in the Medieval Islamic Imagination: A Path Towards Pedagogic Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

Part V: Dignity and Sinfulness Daniel A. Madigan SJ ‘These people have no grasp of God’s true measure’ (Q 39:67): Does the Doctrine of Original Sin do Justice to God and to Humanity? . . . 161 Ralf K. Wüstenberg The ‘Fall’ of Mankind: Structural Parallels between the Narratives of Sin in Christianity and Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Part VI: Limits to Being, Limits to Naming God Simone Dario Nardella God, Man, Being: ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Explanation of the Intellect’s Capacity to Know God in al-Wujūd al-Ḥaqq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

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Paul-A. Hardy On Naming and Silencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Conor Cunningham Thomas Aquinas’ Anthropology: Stuck in the Middle with You . . . . . . . . . . 221

Part VII: Futures Michael Kirwan SJ and Ahmad Achtar ‘The wound where light enters’: A ‘Common Word’ for Being Human in Islam and Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

Acknowledgements The present volume is based on the conference held at the University of Tübingen from the 7th to the 9th of March 2018, under the title which has been used for this volume. Reflecting the interreligious and international inclusiveness of the event, four scholarly institutions were the co-hosts: the Cambridge Muslim College, the St Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute in Moscow, and two departments of the University of Tübingen: the Faculty of Protestant Theology and the Center for Islamic Theology. The entire event was generously funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, to whom the organisers and editors of this volume are immensely indebted.

Note on Transliteration and Dates The transliteration of Arabic names follows that of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three (EI3). Technical terms in Arabic are all italicised except for terms that have become common in English (e.g. Muhammad, Hadith, Islam, imam, mufti, sufi, Sunni, Shi’i). Double dates are used in reference to the Islamic (A. H.) and Common Era (C. E.) calendars (e.g. 716/1316).

Introduction Tim Winter Because religion’s avowed purpose is to reconnect creature with Creator, human attempts to interpret this connection have always taken the form of anthropological as well as of metaphysical systems. Across the world religions, it has been widely understood that human beings are uniquely charged with the duty fully to respond to the Absolute, and that the nature of these knowing human agents who comprise in some way the pivot of creation must therefore be a core subject of religious discourse. The major religions have thus generated extremely rich literatures of psychological speculation and theory, often grounded in traditions of disciplined introspection combined with empirical observations and experiences rooted in active pastoral contexts. What distinguishes the ‘Abrahamic’ traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been the belief that the human person, in knowing or ignoring itself, confronts or absconds from a Divine person, whose creation is linear and moves towards a single end, at which the human composite is to be charged with giving an account of itself, after which, for most premodern thinkers, the human person will experience both continuity and change in a post-mortem world of resurrection and eternal life. At the start of this trajectory there is understood to be a ‘first evil’, sometimes described as a ‘fall’, with Adam as the proto-sinner, and this is thought to account for or to represent the mystery of actual evil in human life, together with the existential human intuition of disquiet, inauthenticity and longing. Religion thus exists to return us to what we were made to be. The same monotheisms therefore concur that this arc of return shows that humanity is itself insofar as it relates wholesomely to its divine source, and that ‘our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee’.1 Made to be mirrors of heaven, the reflection in human beings’ conduct and outlook is palpably imperfect, and hence we experience ourselves not only as recurrent violators of God’s instructions but as deeply inclined to such violations. The religions have addressed this distinction between actual sin and the tendency which generates it by asking complex psychological and cosmological questions about the ontology of our restlessness and the conscience which, as Heidegger saw, is strangely experienced  Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey, Oxford: Parker, 1853, p. 17.

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as a kind of debt. Only humans among the creatures sense a calling to apprehend the world rightly, and in this recognition they alone experience guilt and hence ethical summons.2 In his attempt to characterise this human malaise and striving, the Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan reaches for Heidegger’s category of ‘inauthenticity’ to reference our existential self-awareness as recurrently misdirected beings who intuit their true avocation through Dasein, but are distracted by a quotidian world persistently to choose otherwise: inauthenticity is heteronomy.3 In wrestling with the enigma of the estranged and wilful human self, the theologies recognise a lower and higher mode (psyche and pneuma, nafs and rūḥ), whose higher aspect is a mystery, referred to, for example, in the Qur’anic advice that ‘they ask you about the spirit: say it is of my Lord, and of knowledge you have been given only a little’ (17:85). Through the fog and passion of the lower self, a kind of via negativa allows the inferring of the shape of what we ought to be via a nuanced introspective pathology, richly adumbrated in penitential and pneumatological literature grounded in an attentive experience of human lives and a lived consciousness of Dasein, of the world present to us. The religions’ familiar lists of sins are understood to be more than simply ethical, for they assist in this probing of the human mystery by suggesting that there is in reality an alternative, authentic way for the self to be. For Lonergan, authenticity is self-transcendence, a liberation of spiritus through the mastery of anima; and to accomplish this we need an energising sorge, a horizon, which allows us to live ‘dramatically’, in contrast to secular pursuits of authenticity, which are relativistic, elitist and flat; and this horizon, despite Heidegger, is the monotheistic Divine, which shapes human life through revealing a purified form of behaviour, access to which is available only through grace.4 The self ’s recovered return to a primally-authentic Dasein is experienced as the natural authenticity of the One and the realisation that the Others (Heidegger’s das Man) are ontologically less authentic and cannot on their own disclose the One. Hence the human creature is both part of the nature which intimates its own ground, and apart from it. A further broad consensus is to be found in the belief that the disposition of soul required for this retrieval of prototypical human authenticity is neither a vainglorious self-will nor a passionless Stoic abdication. Christianity and Islam, for all their differences of emphasis, have historically admired a condition of loving surrender to the mystery of self-bestowing Being in all its disclosive manifestations, the virtue that Islam calls ‘purifying oneself from claims to ability and strength’ (al-tabarruʾ min al-ḥawl wa-l-quwwa), which is in a sense the meaning 2  See Donovan Miyasaki, “A Ground for Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 38 (2007), pp. 261–79. 3  Brian J. Braman, Meaning and Authenticity. Bernard Lonergan & Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. 47–72. 4  Braman, pp. 48–51; see also Michael H. McCarthy, Authenticity and Self-Transcendence. The Enduring Insights of Bernard Lonergan, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

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of islām (submission) itself, and which approximates to the state described by Simone Weil as a décréation, an enigmatic ‘passive activity’.5 The Abrahamic human creature, whose paradoxical willed but helpless surrender is exampled at the binding of Abraham’s son, is thus dynamically in conflict with the lower, inauthentic self, and surrendered to the healing dynamism of divine grace and power. This amor fati becomes the disposition of the soul which enables prayer. Islam and Christianity thus continue the Jewish awareness that in addition to our inauthentic actions which allow self to veil spirit there exists a tendency which underlies and generates such actions: Judaism’s yetzer ha-ra, which, according to some Talmudic teaching, is an infantile inheritance which outweighs any positive inclination until a boy reaches the age of thirteen, after which it may be defeated.6 It is on this point that the two younger monotheisms, for all their internal plurivocality, have chosen two characteristically different roads. Muslim thinkers, taking their cue from the Qur’anic data, have typically opted for a version of the relative optimism which the Rabbis evince about body and nature, and in recent times have often deployed the trope of Original Sin as a polemical tool against an overly pessimistic and hence insufficiently humanistic Christianity.7 For Joseph Soloveitchik, ‘Christianity viewed instinct as corrupt and sinful; man’s divine essence asserts itself in his spirit, which is always in a state of war with the flesh. Judaism rehabilitates the flesh […] attaching the quality of divine image to the biological forces in man.’8 The lower soul is not coterminous with body and desire; and Judaism thus ‘proclaims the goodness of the whole of man, of the natural.’9 On this type of disparity, alluded to several times in the present volume, the ‘Semitisms’ and Christianity have created anthropologies which in some respects are notably different, and given the role of the Cross in Christianity, with the implication, drawn out by Paul, that so immense a sacrifice must be atoning for an immense sinfulness, this is evidently linked to their typical soteriologies, where again, Islam and Judaism show themselves substantially allied. Hence, perhaps, the absence of invocations of the beauty of the natural world in the Gospels, a notable departure from the Hebrew Biblical and the Qur’anic accounts of a natural world of divine indicativity.10 The grace which,  5 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd, New York: HarperCollins, 2009, p. 126; compare Schwöbel’s essay in the present volume.  6  Avot de-Rabbi Natan, 16.  7  For instance, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935), see Simon Wood, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs. Rashīd Riḍā’s Modernist Defence of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld, 2012, p. 141; Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood, The Mysteries of Jesus. A Muslim Study of the Origins and Doctrines of the Christian Church, Oxford: Sakina, 2000, pp. 59–61, 66. In the context of this volume, it is useful to remember that arguments over Original Sin and the imago Dei very seldom formed part of the premodern Muslim polemic against Christianity.  8  Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Emergence of Ethical Man, New York: Ktav, 2012, p. 76.  9 Soloveitchik, The Emergence of Ethical Man, p. 73. 10  Cf. Palle Yourgrau, Simone Weil, London: Reaktion, 2011, p. 313.

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for most Christians, enables the retrieval of authenticity is of a supernatural, new and radical kind: for Christianity, God does not only show, but comes. Modern Muslims, typically aligned with Soloveitchik’s critique, have often found this Christian story to suggest an implicit vengefulness in God directed against a hopelessly feeble humanity, and this common rebuke is cited and critiqued in turn by Daniel Madigan, and implicitly by other contributors to our volume. Nietzsche seemed to incorporate it into his philo-Islamic assault on a pusillanimous Christianity,11 ignoring metaphysics and commending Islam for what he saw as its ja-sagende masculine validation of the will and of the body. Islam is Dionysian, Christianity is Apollonian, which explains its dreaming figurative art and its preference for unearthly choir music, which seems, some might observe, to contrast strongly with the earthy and almost sexual rhythms of dervish dhikr.12 Many Muslims have professed themselves disappointed by a Christianity that seems to fight against eros and also to reject the principle of sacred warriorhood, the virtue which Hindu anthropology calls the kshatriya possibility which is considered one of the noblest of callings. This was a key apologetic focus for Rashīd Riḍā, while Iqbal, likewise seeking to interpret Islam to the Western-educated, explicitly drew on Nietzsche in his image of his religion as paradigm of life-affirmation.13 For Muslims, the person of the priest or monk proleptically living a heavenly and seemingly discarnate life has often seemed starkly at variance with the Muslim ideal of the devout married merchant, ruler or warrior;14 conversely, medieval Christian polemic frequently reproached Islam as a ‘garden of nature’,15 where it was believed that sainthood could cohabit with eros, an amalgam which could even proleptically anticipate life in a sensual paradise. Although sexuality and the often related topic of gender are unfashionably ignored in our volume, it is evident that Islam’s anthropology has recurrently generated features of Muslim life such as married saints, public baths, sacred ablutions and divinely-rewarded sexuality which appeared strange or even perverse to many premodern Christians.16 In this there has been a

11 Ian Almond, “Nietzsche’s Peace with Islam. My Enemy’s Enemy is my Friend”, German Life and Letters, 56 (2003), pp. 43–55. 12  Cf. Roy Jackson, Nietzsche and Islam, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 57. 13  Muhammad Iqbal, Javid-Nama, trans. A. J. Arberry, London: Allen and Unwin, 1966, pp. 111–3. 14  See the dialogically-rooted meditations of Louis Gardet, Les hommes de l’Islam. Approche des mentalités, Paris: Hachette, 1997. 15 Norman Daniel, Islam and the West. The Making of an Image, revised edition, Oxford: Oneworld, 1993, p. 166. 16  Ze’ev Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh. Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence, Leiden: Brill, 2005; for the development of Christian attitudes, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, London: Faber and Faber, 1989.

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recurrent divergence which may be realistically considered as symptomatic of very distinct anthropologies. A stark Nietzschean binary which presents the Muslim as a simple ‘Anti-Christ’ does not, however, begin to account for the nuances and historical attenuations of this divergence. Islam historically believed itself to be a corrective to earlier Christian and Jewish straying, a reparation as well as a replenishment, but also claimed that its book ‘confirms (muṣaddiq) what came before it’ (Q 61:6). It comes as an Aufheben in Hegel’s sense, obliterating and preserving at the same time, and in its reflections on anthropology much of our volume points to concurrent differences and convergences between the life which is the imitatio Christi and what Vimercati Sanseverino refers to as the sequela Prophetae. Disappointed Muslim views of an effectively Docetic Christ subside or are at least muted when notice is taken of, for instance, the attitudes to family and children shown in the images of both founders (the childhood of Jesus, the Prophet as father): Jesus too, as the Gospels record, existed very much dans le vrai, so that the pagan criticism of Muhammad which asks, ‘what is amiss with this messenger, that he eats food and walks in the marketplaces’ (Q 25:7) misses its Christic as well as its Muhammadan mark. A further and allied point concerns the primacy of love of God and of neighbour proposed by the well-known Common Word initiative of 2007 as shared human ground, a claim which has been queried by some Christians in their investigations of Islam, who wish to see Islam as a type of ‘Semitic’ reversion, as a religion of law straightforwardly opposed to the Christianity which is a religion of spirit and of love (agape).17 But as many of the discussions which followed the Common Word revealed, this binary accounts very poorly for a complex reality: Christianity has evolved intricate structures of canon law and liturgical regulation, while William Chittick, for instance, has no difficulty in defining Islam as a religion of love.18 Other confoundings of the Nietzschean dichotomy should also be noted. In its complex balancings of the Muhammadan example with the exemplary function of earlier prophets, Islamic literature reveres Christ as a recognised hagiological type, not as a simple clone of Moses or Muhammad but as an ascetic and celibate sage whose monastic followers inspired many early Muslim saints;19 the Qur’an itself respects monks and priests (5:82), and even later the ‘Christic’ type of saint 17 A view which has an equivalent in more secular philosophy, as in the case of Hegel: Gil Anidjar, Semites. Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 32. 18 ‘If any single word can sum up Islamic spirituality – by which I mean the very heart of the Qur’anic message – it should surely be love’. William C. Chittick, Divine Love. Islamic Literature and the Path to God, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, p. xi. See also several of the monographs written by Muslims in response to some Christian reactions to A Common Word, including Ghazi bin Muhammad, Love in the Holy Qur’an, Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2010. 19  Tor Andrae, In the Garden of Myrtles. Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 7–32.

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was exalted in the anthropology of Ibn ʿArabī, in particular.20 A still further reduction in polarities might resolve the claim that the Qur’anic personalities are disappointingly two-dimensional, icon-like images when set beside the chiaroscuro of many Biblical narratives, which portray complex actors in a theodrama in which their greatness and humanity are shown in their times of selfdoubt and personal weakness. There is certainly a contrast between icons and Caravaggio, and here we might even speculate about an East-West differential that transcends confessional boundaries;21 and yet the Qur’an provides an account of the Nativity filled with as many cries of indecision and pain as those the Synoptics provide for Christ at Gethsemane and Golgotha, while the Hadith literature frequently describes the bearer of the Qur’an in eminently human terms. To all these challenges to a notion of Islam and Christianity’s anthropologies as comprising a simple opposing binary one could add the further observation that the two religions’ developed philosophies of the human soul both drew heavily on a shared Hellenistic heritage, and even enriched one another on that basis.22 All these convergences and correlations suggest that Islam’s claimed repair of Christian anthropology is subtle at best, and take us rather far from Nietzsche’s fierce dichotomy. Intersections of sensibility and theoretical framing have been abundant and inexorable in two traditions which share a single Jewish and Messianic root, engage a shared monotheistic premise and a common human subjectivity and physiology, and have significantly cross-pollinated in history. Despite such intersections, and with all due regard to contemporary alarms about metanarratives, the recurrent patterns in the literature, some of which our contributors seek to tease out, indicate that the real divergences between Christian and Muslim anthropologies cannot be entirely deconstructed into nonexistence. Nor will pluralist theologies which insist that rival religious systems are simply alternate formulations of a common truth (Panikkar’s perichoretic model of world religions,23 for example) prove able to negate the reality and the real indicative interest of these patterns, which form part of their particular genius and integrity. Recognising this, several of our contributors attempt some general and at times bold comparisons. The papers in this collection suggest that while simple dichotomies are unfeasible, the most stubbornly persistent and perhaps most indicative issue at 20  Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints. Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn Arabi, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993; Maurice Gloton, Jesus, Son of Mary in the Qur’an and According to the Teachings of Ibn ʿArabī, Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2016. 21  Consider the Orthodox convention which holds that an icon is ‘written’. 22  For instance, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s De anima in the Latin West. The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300, London: Warburg Institute, 2000. 23  Jyri Komulainen, “Panikkar the Dialogical Man. Religion and the Religions”, Raimon Panikkar. A Companion to his Life and Thought, ed. Peter C. Phan and Young-chan Or, Cambridge: James Clarke, 2018, pp. 76–93, at p. 89.

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stake has been the definition and ontology of our intuited sense of guilt and our capacity for moral failure. Latin Christianity unmistakeably took a more radical view than did Islam. Muslim culture did not produce an Augustine, and was unlikely ever to have been hospitable to the idea that Original Sin was transmitted via sexual intercourse. For Augustine, drawing speculatively on a questionable translation of Romans 5:12–5, all humans were present with Adam when he sinned (‘in that one man were we all, when we were all that one man’),24 and so every baby is born both sinning and guilty, while the married sexual desire which engenders it is damnably concupiscent. This diagnosis of sin as an infection or form of genetic damage caused by the radioactive fallout unleashed by Adam’s temerity was once standard throughout the West, and was taken up energetically although in different ways by the Reformers, particularly in the characteristic Calvinist and Wesleyan teaching of Total Depravity. This enabled a prevalent judicial interpretation of sin and redemption, maintained by Catholics at the Council of Trent, which held that heartfelt repentance in the Jewish style was unacceptable to God, since Original Sin is not just a moral but an ontological problem: a cosmic redemption is the only logically sufficient repayment. Adam’s error is recounted also in the Qur’an (2:30–9), which calls it a ‘slip’ (zalla), but there has not been a Muslim sense that all his descendents were present in him as he slipped, to share the guilt: his mishap is a precedent and an archetype but not a source.25 However, the Qur’an is not unfamiliar with the idea of humanity being present ‘in Adam’ in a prelapsarian world. This appears in a soteriological passage which has all human souls mysteriously present within Adam’s loins during a prologue in heaven which occurred even ‘before’ Eden. This is Qur’an 7:172, in which all of Adamic humanity is asked to testify to God’s lordship in an event often known in Persian poetry as the bezm-i alast, the ‘assembly of the Day of “Am I Not Your Lord”.’26 The subsequent human fallingaway, however, of humans later ensouled in embryos and born into this lower world (dunyā), is characterised as forgetfulness, which is, for Chittick, ‘as close as Islam comes to the concept of original sin.’27 It is in this sense that we are, or were, ‘in Adam’. However, the forgetfulness is not the result of that Adamic covenantal ingathering, which was an enlightenment rather than a fall, but is folded into our humanity because we have been kneaded from both ‘clay and spirit, dark24  City of God 13.14, cited in Andrew Louth, “An Eastern Orthodox View”, Original Sin and the Fall. Five Views, ed. J. B. Stump and Chad Meister, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020, pp. 78–100, at p. 87. 25  Angelika Neuwirth, “Negotiating Justice. A Pre-Canonical Reading of the Qur’anic Creation Accounts”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 2 (2000), pp. 25–43, at p. 29. 26  Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam. The Qur’anic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl At-Tustarī (d. 283/896), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980, pp. 146–9. 27  William Chittick, “The Islamic Conception of Human Perfection”, Jung and the Monotheisms. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. J. Ryce-Menuhim, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 154–65, see p. 161.

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ness and light, ignorance and knowledge, activity and passivity’,28 and are prone to forget that we no longer inhabit the primordial world where everything was unmistakeably theophanic. Charles Upton thus describes the Fall as a shift from a ‘cardiac’ to a ‘cerebral’ consciousness.29 Because of the primacy of God’s love and compassion, humanity is redeemed from this forgetfulness through divinelybestowed knowledge, gained through a grace-enabled contemplation of God’s signs in nature and scripture. The sequela Prophetae renders the Muslim open to this knowledge by conforming him or her outwardly and inwardly to a model of humanity perfectly in accordance with the Adamic pattern, bodying-forth the attributes of perfection whose ground is the Divine names, and acting appropriately towards other creatures in accordance with their nature as God’s epiphanies, in what Christian theology might call a ‘relational’ model of the image of God.30 Perhaps the concurrent resemblance and distinctiveness could be further suggested through a different speculative juxtaposition, this time of the enactment of the soteriology of fundamental rituals. At the Eucharist, the Christian is transformed by the blood and body of the Second Adam, whose free self-sacrifice fully satisfies the Father and extinguishes Adam’s sin. For the Muslim, it is the obligatory Hajj which calls to mind Adam, the first dweller in the sanctuary, where the Black Stone is considered God’s ‘right hand on earth,’31 confirming Adam and his purified descendants as God’s khulafāʾ or vicegerents. According to a hadith, the Stone ‘contains’ the witnessing of all humanity at the Day of Alast, which it received when it was a pure white, because unfallen humanity, in the state of fiṭra (primordial natural disposition: recall Lonergan’s sense of ‘authenticity’), did not yet possess the knowledge of good and evil. Sins (but not an original sin) then turned the Stone black.32 As they kiss the Stone, set in a silver monstrance in the tabernacle of the Kaaba which is the locus of the sakīna (= shechina, God’s peaceable indwelling, perhaps a real presence), the pilgrims are engaged in a key sacramental rite, as they follow and enact this visible sign of sanctifying grace. Chroniclers record that some pilgrims, as they gazed into the Stone, would attempt to descry some trace of its original whiteness.33 Again, we find here a strangely simultaneous familiarity and disparity. 28 Chittick,

“The Islamic Conception of Human Perfection”, p. 158.  Charles Upton, The Science of the Greater Jihad. Essays in Principial Psychology, San Rafael CA: Sophia Perennis, 2011, p. 85. 30  For which see Oliver Crisp, “A Christological Model of the Imago Dei”, The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, ed. Joshua R. Farris and Charles Taliaferro, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 217–32, at p. 220. 31  Simon O’Meara, The Kaʿba Orientations. Readings in Islam’s Ancient House, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, p. 59. 32  Charles-André Gilis, La doctrine initiatique du pèlerinage à la Maison d’A llâh, Paris: l’Oeuvre, 1982, pp. 25, 67–8. 33 Michel Chodkiewicz, “The Paradox of the Ka‘ba”, Journal of the Muhyiddin ibn Arabi Society, 57 (2015), pp. 57–83, at p. 62. 29

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So there exists here a significant difference between the anthropologies. However, in our volume, and in the domain of Muslim-Christian engagement more widely, it is noteworthy that the wider Christian theological shift away from a strict interpretation of the Augustinian hamartiology has figured very conspicuously, and in many cases this has improved the dialogue by reducing one of the familiar grounds of modern Muslim disapproval. For many twentiethcentury Christians the concept that babies are born in a damned state seemed to undermine their religion’s self-understanding as a religion of love. To protect the same self-understanding many also moved away from penal understandings of the atonement. New and improved understandings of Judaism have also contributed to this shift, with critics observing, for instance, that for the Hebrew Bible, the Golden Calf rather than Adam’s fall is more usually cited as the root cause of Jewish idolatry.34 To these movements of the scholarly consensus was added a growing desire to acknowledge Darwinian doubts about monogenism (the claim that humanity shared a single human ancestor), which seemed to discredit the Original Sin doctrine on palaeobiological grounds. For reasons such as these, Emil Brunner famously described belief in Original Sin as no less obsolete than belief in centaurs.35 The cumulation of these scholarly displacements together with a wider humanistic zeitgeist ensured that the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s discreetly retreated from a strict Augustinianism. Instrumental here were Henri de Lubac, who lamented the centuries of neo-scholasticism which had separated nature from grace,36 and fellow-Jesuit Karl Rahner, who accused Augustine of ‘an indescribable coldness in your heart’.37 Although criticised as ‘Pelagian’ by conservatives,38 or as a modernism which reduced the doctrine of Original Sin to a meditation on the combination of genes with social mimesis,39 the new and apparently more humanistic hamartiology became standard in Lonergan, who called for an entire recasting of the doctrine, with a new valuation of sexuality as the ‘call of love’, a symbol of the natural desire for God,40 which in the theology 34  Joel B. Green, “A Wesleyan View”, Original Sin and the Fall, ed. Stump and Meister, pp. 55– 77, at p. 72. 35 Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, trans. Olive Wyon, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1952, p. 48. 36  Randall S. Rosenberg, The Givenness of Desire. Concrete Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, p. 18. 37  Karl Rahner, Faith in a Wintry Season, cited in Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and its Implications for the New Evangelization, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012, p. 104. 38  Romano Amerio, Iota Unum. A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century, Kansas City: Sarto House, 1996, p. 565, of Nostra Aetate; see also his critique of Rahner, p. 574. 39  See Hans Madueme, “An Augustinian-Reformed View”, Original Sin and the Fall, ed. Stump and Meister, pp. 11–34, at p. 28. 40  Rosenberg, The Givenness of Desire, p. 130.

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of Jean-Luc Marion becomes a theology of the erotic which Islam and Judaism would not find disappointing.41 Many Protestants, too, have moderated their appreciation of Augustine’s anthropology.42 Despite the anxieties of conservatives and the ongoing commitment to the older doctrines on the part of many evangelicals, this shift is evidently more than a simple aggiornamento or a capitulation to Enlightenment confidences about the benign individual. Historians have pointed to the absence of a serious Original Sin doctrine in the apostolic age (Justin Martyr, for instance, is innocent of it, and the three ecumenical councils do not mention it).43 As the periti at Vatican II noted, Augustine’s severity was by no means the most obvious interpretation of the Gospel anthropology, or even that of Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Eastern Churches had generally regarded Augustine with reserve, not least on this question;44 he had in any case only been rendered into Greek in the fourteenth century. For Orthodox anthropology the focus is on the great arc of creation-deification, with the fall-redemption arc seen as subsidiary, and humanity is perceived not as essentially guilty but as disordered by a sin which cumulatively corrupts us, although it was originated in Adam.45 For some modern Orthodox writers the Original Sin doctrine emerges from Jerome’s misreading of Paul (Romans 5:12–15), on which Augustine built his hamartiology (and also much of his theodicy, which again, in the East, seemed overly severe).46 This all suggests that the modern Christian turn away from Augustine, strongly evident in most of the Christian contributions to the present volume, need not be seen as an inauthentic modernism in rupture with tradition, but appears as an internal Christian ressourcement deriving from a church undeniably rooted in patristic and apostolic wisdom. This repristination of Christian soteriology incorporates a mystical turn, the Eastern Churches maintaining a focus on ‘sharing in the divine nature’ (2 Peter: 4) coupled with a tendency to apophaticism and a relative resistance to systematic philosophical theology. Do we detect an analogous turn among the Muslim contributors to our volume? Many readers accustomed to con41  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 42  E. g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society. A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Charles Scribner, 1932, p. 70. 43  Green, “A Wesleyan View”, p. 62. 44 Fr Seraphim Rose, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, Platina CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983. The impression of some forms of Augustinianism as verging on Marcionite belief seems underlined by the fact that the Orthodox Church celebrates many feast days for Old Testament figures, while the Church of Rome currently recognises none. 45 Louth, “An Eastern Orthodox View”, pp. 81–2. For an excellent account of Orthodoxy’s overall perspective, see Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957, pp. 114–34. 46 Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings. Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008, p. 41.

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temporary discourses in the Muslim world, whether of an Islamist, rationalist or Salafist tendency, will be startled by the immanentism which seemed to guide the Muslim theological anthropologists present at the Tübingen conference. Were the Christians engaging with Muslim interlocutors who were recognisably representative? A good number of them relied extensively on Ibn ʿArabī (d.1240), a figure widely repudiated by contemporary Muslims. Does this represent a sufi tendency current among Muslim theologians in the somewhat narrow world of Western universities, and if so, how should we parse it? The answer, probably, lies not in any undue shaping by the spiritual atmosphere prevailing in Occidental academe, nor in any formal domination of Islamic Studies by the study of Sufism; in fact, the most evident strength of the most recent ‘Oriental Studies’ work has been in Islamic law (fiqh) and in the area of Muslim dialectical theology (kalām). One need not speculate about this ‘mystical’ turn too heavily. It is useful to note that until the nineteenth century, and perhaps, for most ulema, even for much of the twentieth, Ibn ʿArabī’s system was far more influential on Muslim ideas of human selfhood, particularly through his prophetology and his theory of the Perfect Human (al-insān al-kāmil), than was the system of any other thinker. In late nineteenth-century Indian Islam, for instance, his system was ‘axiomatic’.47 So our conversation has been between a Christianity looking to a future reshaped by Orthodox anthropologies, and an Islam which chooses to reference a premodern, more mystical discourse. The resulting mystically-minded convergence on a creation-deification arc seems potentially very fruitful: a ḥikma mashriqiyya, an Oriental Wisdom which seems to suggest new horizons of dialogue and commonalty. Perhaps one final convergence may be identified, this time of a metahistorical nature. Just as one might crudely identify current disputes between Islamists and Sufis as clashes over alternate moods in the Qur’anic text, which very boldly juxtaposes tanzīh (affirming transcendence) and tashbīh (affirming immanence), one might consider the implications of recent trends among Christians concerned to place Islam more respectfully on the map of acknowledged sacrality. Particularly intriguing here are those who try to reference the primal divergence which arose between Judaising and Hellenising tendencies in the early Church and in the New Testament writings themselves. The ‘sin’ text in Romans, whether or not it was distorted by Jerome, reflects a perspective current in much late Greek religion, which sought to dichotomise flesh and spirit (the evolution considered by Foucault in the later volumes of his History of Sexuality). However, there exists another New Testament tradition, evident in the Synoptics 47  Charles M. Ramsey, “Religion, Science, and the Coherence of Prophetic and Natural Revelation. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Religious Writings,” The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, ed. Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 138–58, at p. 142.

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and the Book of James, which is more conventionally Jewish. Historians of Jewish Christianity have often pointed to the apparent re-emergence of its themes in Islam.48 For some advocates of comparative Muslim-Christian theology this even supplies the ground and origin of the divergence, so that Muhammad and Augustine turn into later convections of the dispute between Peter and Paul. The hugely-influential Tübingen theologian Hans Küng has been outspoken here, insisting that the Jewish Christians were ‘the very first paradigm of Christianity,’49 its ‘legitimate heirs’,50 and while he is far from rejecting the Pauline ‘brother Christianity’, proposes this as a basis for a new Christian recognition of Islam. Neither Muslims nor Christians have been immediately galvanised by this latest innovation of Tübingen biblical theology, but it rests on reasonably secure historical and New Testament grounds, and may obtain greater traction in future, as our dialogue continues to evolve.51 We turn now to a brief summary of the papers presented in this volume. The first is by Christoph Schwöbel, whose death in September 2021 came as a serious loss not only to Christian theology but also to the discipline of Muslim-Christian relations. Schwöbel begins our discussion with some far-reaching observations about the nature of religious talk about humanity. Since, for him, we are relational beings whose relations are determined by God’s relationship to us, a theological anthropology stands as a direct and categoric challenge to any secular equivalent. Bringing Luther, Ghazālī and HaLevi into conversation, he demonstrates their convergence on the need for a philosophically-rigorous demonstration that philosophy is insufficient in any metaphysical project, which must begin with a self-knowledge rooted in an awareness that our personhood exists ‘in God’. The three authors recognise the validity of a self-knowledge which allows an intuition of the divine, through a ‘radical passivity’ of the humbled human subject, which is identified as a ‘knowledge of the heart’. The adequate operation of this faculty is dependent on our admission of our subjection to demonic forces, and although Judaism, Christianity and Islam have differed widely in their diagnosis of our status as entities distant from God, they agree that the divine and human mysteries interpret each other. Theology, then, unlike philosophy, can attempt a contemporary account of mind and self, accommodating context, history, our fallibility, and divine ineffability.

48  Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus. Recovering the True History of Early Christianity, vol. I, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 3. 49  Hans Küng, Islam. Past, Present & Future, trans. John Bowden, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007, p. 37. 50  Küng, Islam, p. 497. 51  For an attempt at a full theology of convergence based on this analysis, see Samuel Zinner, The Abrahamic Archetype. Conceptual and Historical Relationships between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Cambridge: Archetype, 2011.

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Recep Şentürk’s contribution, which is informed by a social science perspective, returns us to Ghazālī, but this time to his moral and psychological opus the Revival of the Religious Sciences, supplemented with references to Ottoman scholarship. Ghazālī’s complex treatment of the human person continues the trope of the difficulty of defining the conscious human subject, which Şentürk shows can be resolved by adding soul to body and mind. Islamic and specifically sufi theories of human personhood often identify seven ‘degrees’, which represent an ontological hierarchy in the self, which may, on the basis of Qur’anic phrases, be reduced to three degrees or manifestations of the self. Sufism’s concern with self-knowledge through self-awareness and self-discipline allows a progression from subordination under the sign of instinct, through a conscious struggle rooted in self-reproach, to a mastery of lower impulses, generating a true freedom. The complex Ghazālian science of self-transformation delivers a theory of humanity in which introspective self-naughting shaped by the rectification of intention can generate a ‘self ’ worthy of salvation; this remains, however, entirely under the authority of divine grace. Ivana Noble’s contribution in many respects affirms Şentürk’s idea of the sanctity of the freedom of the human will. But it does this by exploring the difficult but all-important tension between the Biblical ideas of humanity as God’s image, and the idea of God’s likeness. All creation partakes in the former, for all are His beloved creatures, and this can be determined in the face of the Other, who is always to be defended and upheld, even against improper theologies of hierarchy and distinction which separate gender, class and nation. Adam and Eve ‘fell’, and the way back is repentance, experienced as a gift and an occasion for grace, so that ‘the expulsion out of Paradise would make another growth possible: the Fall enables Christ to appear in history’. Building on Irenaeus and the modern Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stăniloae, Noble shows that the purpose of the ‘fall’ is to initiate humanity into the wisdom that our freedom, constitutive of our Divine likeness, is only itself if we are free of passion and liberated to serve the Other, and hence God, the source of the love which enables this restoration of ‘the memory of God in us.’ In her contribution Lejla Demiri considers the human condition through the optic of our mortality. While Islam is an axial religion and assumes the reality of linear time, which leads from Creation to Resurrection, it incorporates aspects of a cyclical vision of temporal movement in its comparisons between human experience and the seasonal cycles of the natural world. Using material from the Qur’an and Ghazālī’s Iḥyā’, she shows how in this dynamic vision of creation after creation, every stage of human life is a renewal. Even death, for the scripture, is not a dark terminus but another creation, a positive aspect of divine agency which takes the human subject ‘back’. This anthropology is thus strongly eschatologically-oriented, with Ghazālī’s work ending with the ‘remembrance of death’. There is also a volitional death, by which we strip ourselves of

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ego, thus ‘dying before we die’, in another interruption of simple linearity. Time itself, therefore, from which human nature cannot be separated, emphasises the unique preciousness of life as a blessing, as well as enabling the key aspects of our humanity, our belongingness to nature, and the significance of our moral choices for the life to come. Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino’s extensive analysis of the Qur’anic doctrine of humanity may be read as a critique of contemporary fundamentalist and implicitly secularising reductions of the person of the Prophet to that of a leader and legislator, and thus as a diagnosis of much contemporary Islamist dysfunction. Contrasting this impoverishment with the ongoing Christian emphasis on the ontological and grace-filled function of the imitatio Christi, Sanseverino shows that the Prophet is conceived in the Qur’an as the archetype of humanity and also as an exemplar whose life in God is the characteristically Muslim manner of expressing election. This is why the Sunna provides a uniquely detailed account of the life of the religion’s founder: every detail is an opportunity to experience grace, and, as the Qur’an says, to receive God’s love in its fullness. The key is to be found in the Qur’anic account of the creation of Adam, which shows the angels’ reductionist pessimism about his potential, which is countermanded by the divine insistence on man’s unique dignity. This is linked to the mystery of the human spirit (rūḥ), intrinsic in Adam’s clay, and the unknowability of this which the scripture affirms indicates the point made elsewhere in our collection, which is that humanity is an enigma because its nature is divinely-sourced and oriented. The conclusion is that the Hadith literature functions epistemologically: through following the Prophet, humanity conforms to the original grace-filled pattern to which the angels prostrated, and is able to know. The study and preservation of Hadith, sometimes seen as a mysterious and particularly Islamic preoccupation, thus emerges as vital to sacred anthropology, and thus to the Muslim path to perfection. Amina Nawaz proposes an exercise in historical anthropology through a close reading of a devotional text from sixteenth-century Spain, a context of persecution for a community which was effectively confined to a catacomb existence. The secret practice of Islam’s considerable curriculum of devotional practices and societal attitudes offered major challenges, which are often seen as the catalyst for syncretism and compromise, and texts have been found in which Christian devotional manuals have been cannibalised by persecuted Muslim authors and attributed to classical Muslim authors. However, Nawaz’s chosen text presents a recognisably normative set of practices and virtues, showing the resilience of Islamic religion and its resistance to compromise and dilution even under conditions of extreme stress. The worship-based vision of humanity set out in classical Islamic schemata of life was evidently experienced as deeply persuasive and satisfying to these communities, a conclusion which appears to suggest that Muslim and also Christian forms of life will prove resilient in their present-day contestation with rival secular visions of human becoming.

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In his essay Friedrich Schweitzer explores the promise offered to MuslimChristian dialogue by a comparative anthropology of the child. Lutheranism, like other Christian traditions, offers rich resources for considering the nature of children as created in God’s image, a teaching whose implications have been expressed in recent Lutheran reforms allowing children to receive the Eucharist. This positive view of children as much more than small or undeveloped adults permits a theology of the rights of the child and a broader ethic of the way children are to be treated in society, particularly in religious education, as well as deepening the theological anthropology of adults. Noting areas of overlap and possible difference with Islamic perspectives, the author points to ways in which Muslim-Christian dialogue could be enriched by a hitherto neglected focus on the child. Complementing Schweitzer’s focus, Mujadad Zaman draws attention to classical Islam’s rich legacy of reflection on the nature of children. He shows that this begins with key Qur’anic narratives, including the celebrated Nativity sequence, and is further elaborated in the Hadith literature and the Prophetic biography (sīra), which presents the Prophet as particularly fond of children, to whom he would show not only forbearance but respect; the case of his daughter Fāṭima being the subject of particularly close medieval attention. This scriptural and prophetic foundation was developed by later authors such as Ibn al-Qayyim and Ghazālī, who reflected on the doctrine of the child’s innate Godfearing and natural disposition (fiṭra). The child, even the baby, is an uncut jewel, a gift of God and a sign of grace, generated by obedience to the command to ‘go forth and multiply’. Moreover, Zaman asserts, Islam’s anthropology of the child is distinctive for its sense that the child is not ‘fallen’. As levels of child happiness diminish in the modern world, this rich scriptural and theological heritage deserves to be resourced and treated with more respect by educational theorists. In one of our volume’s more direct juxtapositions of Christian and Muslim teaching, Dan A. Madigan offers a Christian response to the polemical critique of doctrines of Original Sin offered by the Palestinian-American scholar Ismail al-Faruqi, coupled with some further allusions to the Islamist author Mawdudi. Taking his cue from the Catholic turn in reflection on sin represented by Karl Rahner and in some respects confirmed by Orthodox thinking, Madigan suggests that for Christians, Original Sin is a doctrine discovered through self-reflection, so that the Biblical Fall narrative is to be taken not as the initiating moment of human sinfulness, but rather as a representation of something present in us all. While he recognises the force of Faruqi’s polemic in the case of some classical Christian formulations, he suggests that Faruqi, and Muslims generally, have misinterpreted the Qur’anic teaching on which they ground themselves, and proposes some corrections to their understanding of the Muslim scripture which will bring them closer into harmony with modern Christian insights. The Qur’an speaks of the ‘soul that enjoins evil’, and this, for Madigan, is not far from the

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Christian diagnosis. Finally, Jesus’ sacrificial atoning for sin and his satisfaction of the Father cannot be understood as the latter’s demand for the former’s death; Muslims should understand that it is God Himself who is giving Himself freely in sacrifice. Further, Anselmian notions of atonement, attacked by Faruqi as diminishing the significance of the moral life of human beings, should be abandoned in favour of more contemporary but also Thomist understandings of human agency as participating in the work of salvation, which is nonetheless God’s work. Ralf K. Wüstenberg follows Madigan’s reflections with a further direct comparison, but finds a greater convergence between Muslim and Christian anthropologies. Inspired by his Reformed heritage but not directly referencing Original Sin, Wüstenberg draws attention to a number of common themes which the two religions share, which he believes have been underestimated in much Muslim-Christian comparison. Challenging older and simplistic characterisations of Islam as a religion of law and Christianity as a religion of grace, he notes that the Biblical and Qur’anic Fall narratives accept that sinful works result from the ultimate error of failing to ‘let God be God’, and of attributing divine qualities to oneself. Sin is the failure to see phenomena in the world as God’s signs. Forgiveness, then, comes from remembering God’s mercy, and thus repenting, and in the Qur’an this is triggered by reflecting on God’s signs in scripture as well as in the universe. The Qur’anic soteriology thus seems to converge with Calvin’s belief that salvation, liberation and guidance belong together; Calvin also agrees with Islam that the knowledge of self and of God are two aspects of the same Divinely-authored saving process. Unlike some other Christian students of Islam, Wüstenberg, reading Ghazālī’s treatment of repentance in his Iḥyā’, finds that the Muslim God is full of mercy and longs for human repentance, and takes the initiative in compassionately ‘reminding’. Nonetheless, the two soteriologies are different: Muslims and Christians have fallen ‘differently’. For Christians, the fall is a more acute predicament, so that only after baptism may we act authentically; moreover, Christ is indispensable. Wüstenberg does not mention the Cross, but observes that for his Christian theology it is through Christ, in his perfect obedience to God, that virtue is imputed to us; without the gift of grace for us through a perfect servant of God, salvation will be incomplete. Nonetheless, Muslims believe also in a gift of grace, which is direct: ‘forgiveness and mercy are, in Islam, God’s answer to the sins of men’. The whole essay points to some underestimated convergences between Islam and Reformed theology which deserve further exploration. The question of human nature is resolved radically in the ontology of Ibn ʿArabī and his school, and in his essay, which includes a translated section, Simone Nardella describes one of the most nuanced and controversial of Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings, as presented by the Damascene jurist and sufi, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), whose particular abilities in summarising and re-orienting Ibn ʿArabī’s system have attracted much recent scholarly interest. In this mystical

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vision, each creature, including the human creature, exists through God, and is ‘only a determination, willed by God Himself, of His own Being’. Hence the human perception of entities is perspectival and relative, although it is not delusory. At the highest stage of spiritual development, the Muslim reaches fanāʾ, ‘annihilation’, when the self experiences its own non-existence and only the Divine self remains. This ‘reaching’ is a Divine gift; our human faculties cannot achieve it. Even before attaining this degree, the sufi witnesses that everything in creation is a sign and testimony of God, a disposition of His Being. Nābulusī adds some remarkable meditations on the scriptural texts which suggest that nature is animated, so that non-human entities also possess consciousness and knowledge, although humans maintain eminence as the capstone of the hierarchy of creatures. Paul-A. Hardy offers another analysis of how purely logical resolutions of the paradoxes of God-talk and human-talk, which struggle to determine predicates, have been addressed analogously in Christianity and Islam through a mystical turn; and like several of our authors he turns to Ibn ʿArabī for support. For Islam one can find a clue to this option in Islamic thought’s commending of the recitation of God’s names not only as an apparent exercise in theological predication but as a moral and transformative exercise which ‘silences the semantically-motivated voice’. The attainment of the ‘annihilation’ (mentioned by Nardella) can be seen as the realisation that the names are indexicals of God Himself, and ‘are’ His total presence; the repeated Hesychast prayer in some analogous ways accesses Christ as an icon, not as a description or a reference. The later Wittgenstein is then resourced to query the sufficiency of mere nominal reference and to show that some entities are not referenced nominally, as with nonverbal gesture, which Islam might denote as ishāra. With the help of Wittgenstein and Heidegger we can see the repetition of the predicates as a ‘silencing’ rather than as a mere listing of values. ‘Being’ is not one of the 99 Names, even though God says, ‘Be’: it is not a conventional speech act but is reality itself. Hellenism obscured the Qur’anic Being by making it an abstraction, rather than the concrete ‘finding’ specified by the term wujūd rooted in scripture and etymologically pondered by metaphysical Sufism. Ibn ʿArabī restored the Qur’anic language and allowed the God of revelation to speak again. ‘All this suggests’, for Hardy, ‘a theological anthropology based on man’s encounter with silence, not an encounter between human beings and “God”, which varies from self to self.’ In a finely-argued discussion of Aquinas’ later understanding of the soulbody relation, Conor Cunningham returns us to the question of the adequacy of human language to deal with the human subject, whose deiform nature and Divine dependency impose a certain apophaticism. Cunningham, challenging some modernist readings of Aquinas, insists that whether or not it is articulated in Platonic terms a straightforward mind-body dualism is humanly and

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theologically destructive, and shows that soul and body are co-dependent, existing in a state of mutual need analogous to marriage. To the antique hylomorphic combination of form and matter esse must be added: the soul is the form of the body, and yet more is at stake than a simple concatenation of the two, or a crypto-Docetic claim that the soul is simply the body’s epiphenomenon. Aquinas thus profoundly respects the body as an aspect and condition of our fullness, implied by the hypostatic union and humanly manifested at the Resurrection and also subsequently in the Beatific Vision. This fullness exists in company: the body ensures the permanence of a horizontal as well as a vertical orientation; perceiving with its sense the holiness of others it offers a further proof of its indispensability. Moreover, the plenitude of the Beatific Vision seems to be enhanced by the ongoing capacity of the transformed human subject to enjoy the closeness of similarly transformed friends and family. Hence Aquinas opposes the Plotinian conviction that souls are absorbed when experiencing union with God; and this is perhaps underlined by the Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection, which present him as interacting in familiar ways with others. The final contribution by Michael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar proposes another comparative approach, focused on Bible and Qur’an, and exploring the ability of Girard’s mimetic theory to deepen the ‘common word’ or shared agenda of the two religions. The approach must begin by recognising the tension which arises between secular anthropology which emphasises human difference, and a theological anthropology which tends to conceive of a single humanity in relationship to God. Christian anthropologies in particular seem richly diverse. Although Christians agree on the pivotal reparative work of Christ as Second Adam, the extent and nature of his work are very diversely interpreted, even though many classical Christian definitions are now considered obsolete. In this complex environment can Girard’s mimetic theory account for the differences which we still seem able to discern between the Biblical and Qur’anic visions of man? The deployment of Girard would begin with the sober awareness of the centrality of violence in human experience, resurgent in our own era, and go on to propose that this violence, rooted in envy, is derived from the emulation of the violent Other. The scriptural Fall narratives agree that man’s covetousness, a kind of envy, challenges God’s sovereignty; it is our hamartia. Idolatry and moral weakness turn out to be aspects of the same flaw. On Girard’s theory the Abrahamic Revolution destroyed ancient sacrificial demonisings of the Other and hence a false sacred; and this, despite much evidence, suggests that there is indeed a movement of progress in human history. The authors suggest that Islam turns out to be comparably progressist, as suggested by the rejection of the idea of a sacrificial victim or scapegoat, which is evident in Biblical and Qur’anic tellings of Joseph’s story as well. Despite the current crises in the world, this antientropic, upward view of human history unites the monotheisms, and could be described as an aspect of the ‘common word between us’. However, the Cross for

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Girard remains a stumbling-block for Islam: Christians understand that God’s face is most properly seen in the victim. This is symptomatic of a wider difference in the two imaginaries: the Bible’s theodrama is very different from Qur’anic history, which proceeds from the perspective of God, rather than that of human indecision and agony. To conclude. Although our conference juxtaposed two religions whose mutual relations and internal narratives have been so bewilderingly intricate as to negate the naively essentialist ‘comparative religion’ paradigms of the type common until a generation ago, it is clear that the contributors have brought into view some broadly recurrent patterns. It turns out that there are indeed defensible ways in which we can recognise Islamic and Christian strategies of grappling with the human enigma, indicating that the two thought-worlds have been shaped by distinctive traditions of philosophical and mystical diagnostics of that mysterium iniquitatis which seems so paradoxical a feature of a world for which humanity was created to be the theomorphic climax and purpose. For all their diversity, the two universes of belief have worked with notions of the imago dei,52 a prologue in Heaven involving departure from a primal state, selfdiscipline as a method of return, and the presiding and guiding unity of a benign Creator, all themes adumbrated in ways which suggest areas of overlap but also reveal distinctive emphases of anthropological theory which often reflect the distinct scriptural grounds from which Muslims and Christians have sought to work. The papers also demonstrate the invaluable foundation which rigorous historiographic and textual work provides to good theology. As divinity schools continue the process of widening their curricula beyond the traditional constraints of confessional boundaries, our volume suggests ways in which a mutual enrichment of doctrinal and ethical perspectives can thrive within the context of a modern academy, with all its epistemological and methodological requirements and capacities.

Bibliography Almond, Ian, “Nietzsche’s Peace with Islam. My Enemy’s Enemy is my Friend”, German Life and Letters, 56 (2003), pp. 43–55. Amerio, Romano, Iota Unum. A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century, Kansas City: Sarto House, 1996. Andrae, Tor, In the Garden of Myrtles. Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Anidjar, Gil, Semites. Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 52  Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God. Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 36–51; Daniel Gimaret, Dieu à l’image de l’homme. Les anthropomorphismes de la sunna et leur interprétation par les théologiens, Paris: Cerf, 1997.

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Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey, Oxford: Parker, 1853. Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginnings. Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. Böwering, Gerhard, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam. The Qur’anic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl At-Tustarī (d. 283/896), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980. Braman, Brian J. Meaning and Authenticity. Bernard Lonergan & Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Brown, Peter, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, London: Faber and Faber, 1989. Brunner, Emil, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, trans. Olive Wyon, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1952. Chittick, William C., Divine Love. Islamic Literature and the Path to God, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Chittick, William C., “The Islamic Conception of Human Perfection”, Jung and the Monotheisms. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. J. Ryce-Menuhim, London: Routledge, 1994. Chodkiewicz, Michel, Seal of the Saints. Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn Arabi, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993. Chodkiewicz, Michel, “The Paradox of the Ka‘ba”, Journal of the Muhyiddin ibn Arabi Society, 57 (2015), pp. 57–83. Crisp, Oliver, “A Christological Model of the Imago Dei”, The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, ed. Joshua R. Farris and Charles Taliaferro, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 217–32. Daniel, Norman, Islam and the West. The Making of an Image, revised edition, Oxford: Oneworld, 1993. Eisenman, Robert, James the Brother of Jesus. Recovering the True History of Early Christianity, vol. I, London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Gardet, Louis, Les hommes de l’Islam. Approche des mentalités, Paris: Hachette, 1997. Ghazi bin Muhammad, Love in the Holy Qur’an, Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2010. Gilis, Charles-André, La doctrine initiatique du pèlerinage à la Maison d’A llâh, Paris: l’Oeuvre, 1982. Gimaret, Daniel, Dieu à l’image de l’homme. Les anthropomorphismes de la sunna et leur interprétation par les théologiens, Paris: Cerf, 1997. Gloton, Maurice, Jesus, Son of Mary in the Qur’an and According to the Teachings of Ibn ʿArabī, Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2016. Green, Joel B., “A Wesleyan View”, Original Sin and the Fall. Five Views, ed. J. B. Stump and Chad Meister, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020, pp. 55–77. Hasse, Dag Nikolaus, Avicenna’s De anima in the Latin West. The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300, London: Warburg Institute, 2000. Iqbal, Muhammad, Javid-Nama, trans. A. J. Arberry, London: Allen and Unwin, 1966. Jackson, Roy, Nietzsche and Islam, London: Routledge, 2007. Komulainen, Jyri, “Panikkar the Dialogical Man: Religion and the Religions”, Raimon Panikkar: A Companion to his Life and Thought, ed. Peter C. Phan and Young-chan Or, Cambridge: James Clarke, 2018, pp. 76–93. Küng, Hans, Islam. Past, Present & Future, trans. John Bowden, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. Lossky, Vladimir, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957, pp. 114–34.

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Louth, Andrew, “An Eastern Orthodox View”, Original Sin and the Fall. Five Views, ed. J. B. Stump and Chad Meister, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020, pp. 78–100. Madueme, Hans, “An Augustinian-Reformed View”, Original Sin and the Fall. Five Views, ed. J. B. Stump and Chad Meister, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020, pp. 11–34. Maghen, Ze’ev, Virtues of the Flesh. Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence, Leiden: Brill, 2005. Maqsood, Ruqaiyyah Waris, The Mysteries of Jesus. A Muslim Study of the Origins and Doctrines of the Christian Church, Oxford: Sakina, 2000. Marion, Jean-Luc, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Martin, Ralph, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and its Implications for the New Evangelization, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. McCarthy, Michael H., Authenticity and Self-Transcendence. The Enduring Insights of Bernard Lonergan, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Miyasaki, Donovan, “A Ground for Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 38 (2007), pp. 261–79. Neuwirth, Angelika, “Negotiating Justice. A Pre-Canonical Reading of the Qur’anic Creation Accounts”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 2 (2000), pp. 25–43. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society. A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Charles Scribner, 1932. O’Meara, Simon, The Kaʿba Orientations. Readings in Islam’s Ancient House, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Rahner, Karl, Faith in a Wintry Season: Conversations and Interviews with Karl Rahner in the Last Year of his Life, New York: Crossroad, 1990. Ramsey, Charles M., “Religion, Science, and the Coherence of Prophetic and Natural Revelation: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Religious Writings”, The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, ed. Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 138–58. Rose, Seraphim, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, Platina CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983. Rosenberg, Randall S., The Givenness of Desire. Concrete Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Soloveitchik, Joseph B., The Emergence of Ethical Man, New York: Ktav, 2012. Soskice, Janet Martin, The Kindness of God. Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Upton, Charles, The Science of the Greater Jihad. Essays in Principial Psychology, San Rafael CA: Sophia Perennis, 2011. Weil, Simon, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd, New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Wood, Simon, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs. Rashīd Riḍā’s Modernist Defence of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld, 2012. Yourgrau, Palle, Simone Weil, London: Reaktion, 2011. Zinner, Samuel, The Abrahamic Archetype. Conceptual and Historical Relationships between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Cambridge: Archetype, 2011.

Part I: Created in the Image: Human Wholeness

‘Theology … defines the whole and complete and perfect human being.’ Being Human in the Dispute between Theology and Philosophy: Variations on a Christian, Muslim and Jewish Theme Christoph Schwöbel Theological Anthropology in Dialogue ‘Human beings are self-interpreting animals.’1 The questions ‘who am I?’, ‘what am I?’ and ‘for what purpose do I exist?’ are inscribed into human existence. These questions are inextricably linked to the question of how humans acquire insight into their identity, nature and destiny. Theological anthropology has its specific characteristic in making both questions (the question concerning the human condition and the question of how humans acquire knowledge of their condition) dependent on a relationship to God. Among the network of relationships in which humans as relational beings live, the relationship to themselves, to other persons, to their environment and to the world, it is the relationship to God that, in the view of theological anthropology, is the foundation of all other relationships and determines their shape and end. Since God is seen as the creator and consummator of everything that is not God, the very character of this relationship implies that it is an asymmetrical relationship, established, maintained, restored and perfected by God, both with regard to its being and with regard to knowledge of it. For theological anthropology, therefore, the fact that human beings are self-interpreting animals follows from the fact that they are addressed by God and called to respond to God, being responsible before God in all their relationships. Being self-interpreting animals is an implication of the fact that humans are understood as creatures addressed by God and being enabled and obliged to respond to God. This extravagant claim necessarily involves theological anthropologies in occasionally heated debates with non-theological anthropologies. 1  Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals”, Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 45–76.

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Doing theological anthropology in interreligious perspective, in conversation between Christians and Muslims, presupposes the conviction, held by both partners, that the relationship to God is the determinative relationship in which humans exist. However, this shared conviction is only given in the views of their respective faith traditions. It is bound to a particular perspective and can only proceed from the self-interpretation of this particular perspective for the other partners. These specific perspectives are themselves by no means monolithic. Each includes a significant degree of variation, difference and conflict. While the independence condition is a requirement for any dialogue, dialogue only becomes meaningful when there is also sufficient interdependence between the partners in conversation. In the case of Christianity and Islam, this interdependence is not only given in their historical relationships and their shared relationship to Judaism, but, more importantly, by the fact that they make truth-claims which also include the other. This alone necessitates the requirement of a commitment to understanding, which includes a duty to expound and a right to respond between the so-called Abrahamic faiths. The duty to expound must be based on the attempt at making one’s own position understandable to the other and so enable an adequate response by the other; on the other hand, it must also be guided by the attempt at understanding the position of the other by analogical extensions of one’s own language of faith to the language of the other, by experimental translations of one’s own language into the language of the other and of the language of the other into one’s own language.2 This procedure has a strong referential grounding if we take seriously the claim by both partners in conversation that they are not just talking about the relationships between language games but about the relationship to the one radically creative reality, God, in relation to whom it must be determined what it means to be human.3

2  On these basic requirements of dialogue, see Christoph Schwöbel, “Talking over the Fence. From Toleration to Dialogue”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 45 (2003), pp. 115–30. 3  How humans can appropriately refer to God is a much-debated issue in the theological traditions of the Abrahamic faiths. Anselm’s famous formula that God is ‘something-thanwhich-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’ (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit) in Proslogion 2 is prefaced by the petition: ‘Well then Lord, You who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand, as much as You see fit, that You exist as we believe You to exist, and that You are what we believe You to be’ (Prosl. 2) and it concludes with a prayer of thanksgiving: ‘I give thanks, good Lord, I give thanks to You, since what I believed before through Your free gift I now so understand through Your illumination’ (Prosl. 4). Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (1998), pp. 87 and 89. See also Paul A. Hardy’s essay in the present volume, “On Naming and Silencing”.

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Martin Luther’s ‘Disputation concerning Man’ and the Contentious Relationship between Philosophy and Theology Martin Luther’s Disputation concerning Man from 1536 is rightly regarded as the most concise (and controversial) statement of what it means to be human in Reformation theology.4 It is also one of the most provocative statements about the relationship between philosophy and theology concerning knowledge of the human. As such, it is a variation on a common theme in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. The question is not just about what philosophy and theology can say about what it means to be human, but also about how they arrive at what they can say about human nature. This question concerns a key problem of philosophical and theological anthropology: the question of the capacities and incapacities of human action, including human knowing, and so the question about the status and pattern of passivity and activity, of spontaneity and receptivity in the relational being of humans.

The Glory and Misery of Philosophy Luther offers twenty theses on philosophy and twenty theses on theology. Both are defined as forms of wisdom. Philosophy as human wisdom defines the human as an animal having reason, sensation and body (th. 1).5 The approach from wisdom, rather than from the other forms of knowing Aristotle distinguished (epistéme, téchne, phrónesis and noûs)6, is highly significant, because wisdom is always self-involving knowledge, directed at the highest good, combining knowledge of the object with love for the object.7 For Luther, wisdom combines rational, sensible and bodily forms of knowing. It is aimed at a holistic picture 4 Luther’s Disputatio de Homine has been exhaustively commented upon by Gerhard Ebeling, Lutherstudien, Bd. II. Erster Teil. Text und Traditionshintergrund, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977; Zweiter Teil. Die philosophische Definition des Menschen. Kommentar zu These 1–19, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982; Dritter Teil. Die theologische Definition des Menschen. Kommentar zu These 20–40, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989. 5  Martin Luther, Disputation on Man, trans. Lewis W. Spitz, Luther Works. Vol. 34. Career of the Reformer IV, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Lewis W. Spitz, St Louis MI: Concordia Publishing House, 1960, pp. 137–40., thesis 1, p. 137. This edition is quoted with the number of the thesis and a page reference in the footnotes. 6  See Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, 1139b18–1141b27. 7 See Augustine De Trinitate XII, 14 f. and XIV, 1–2. It seems only natural that the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther was familiar with Augustine’s view of wisdom. In Augustine’s view wisdom must be understood as the similitude and image of God the Father. Therefore, in Christ ‘are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Colossians 2:3). Therefore, Augustine distinguished between wisdom (sapientia) as the understanding of divine and eternal things (sapientia est aeternarum rerum cognitio intellectualis), and science (scientia) which is concerned with temporal matters (scientia est temporalium rerum cognitio rationalis).

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of what it means to be human. The next theses could well be summarised under the rubric ‘In Praise of Reason’, because Luther celebrates it as the head of all things, the best of this life and even something divine (divinum quiddam).8 The qualification comes in the phrase ‘this life’ which defines human beings as mortal and is so bound to the conditions of finitude. Luther calls reason the inventor and governor of all the things which humans in this life can possess through wisdom, power, competence and glory, in the liberal arts, in medicine and in jurisprudence.9 While Luther lists all the subjects of a medieval university, theology is conspicuously absent from the list. Nevertheless, it seems right that reason is the essential characteristic that distinguishes humans from other animals and things.10 Even Scripture confirms reason as the ruler (domina) over the earth, the birds, the fish and cattle by calling upon her to rule (dominamini, Gen. 1:28). Reason is in this way regarded as the sun and a somewhat divine reality (sol et numen quoddam), posited to administer matters in this life.11 In this position of majesty reason is not taken away by God after the fall of Adam but rather confirmed.12 However – and now comes the critique of reason: Reason does not know itself a priori, by deduction from first principles, but only a posteriori, from the experience it makes with itself.13 What reason is, is determined by how reason is practised and how this is experienced. There is only descriptive knowledge of reason. If one considers that by comparing philosophy or reason with theology, it appears that we know next to nothing (paene nihil) about what it means to be human. It should be noted that even in these critical statements about philosophy and reason Luther uses the inclusive and self-including ‘we’. Neither reason nor philosophy know the material cause of what it is to be human.14 Reason knows neither the efficient nor the final cause of humanity.15 It posits peace in this life as the final cause of humanity (thereby showing its ignorance of human destiny), and it does not know that God the creator is the efficient cause of everything there is.16 About the soul there is no agreement between philosophers, and Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the principle of a living body is nothing but a joke.17 There is, Luther contends, no hope that humans will ever know  Thesis 4, p. 137.  Thesis 5, p. 137. 10  Thesis 6, p. 137. 11  See thesis 8, p. 137. 12 See thesis 9, p. 137. 13  See thesis 10, p. 137. 14  See thesis 12, p. 138. 15 See thesis 13, p. 138. 16  See thesis 14, p. 138. 17  See thesis 16, p. 138. Luther refers here to Aristotle’s definition of the soul in De Anima which had already become the target of criticism from Ghazālī and Judah Halevi. Aristotle writes: ‘But the soul is the cause and first principle of the living body. But the soul is equally the  8  9

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themselves, especially the soul, unless they see themselves in the source itself, which is God (in fonte ipso qui Deus est).18 Humans have no full and certain power over their capacities to decide or to know and are therefore subject to chance and nothingness. In sum, just like this life, so is the knowledge of humans in philosophy: exiguous, slippery and all too material. If one considers this dialectical view of philosophy and reason, it seems hard to reconcile the two sides of the dialectic. Praised on the one hand as something divine, they are on the other hand denigrated as futile. Luther turns the most important tool of explanation, the Aristotelian scheme of the four causes, against philosophy. It fails by its own standards because it can neither provide an account of the origin nor of the end of human life, and therefore also fails to account for its matter and form. While the way reason functions a posteriori seems to be acknowledged, it is denied any access to first principles from which it could explain what humans are. Since by definition this life, the mortal life of humans, has no grasp of its origin nor of its end, philosophy as the attempt to deal with ultimate questions therefore fails. What is simply contingently given, is not a possible object of explanation, and this constitutes the misery of philosophy.

The Misery and Glory of Humans – Viewed Theologically With regard to theology, Luther’s thesis is: ‘Theology defines from the plenitude of its wisdom the whole and perfect human being (hominem totum et perfectum).’19 What follows is a brief outline of the divine economy: Humans are God’s creatures, consisting of flesh and a living soul (Gen 2:7), created to be the image of God (Gen 1:26 f.), without sin, in order to procreate, to rule over the things (Gen 1:28–30) and never to die. After the Fall, humans are subject to the power of the devil, of sin and of death from which they cannot liberate themselves by their own powers. Therefore, the creatures can only be liberated by Christ Jesus, the Son of God (if they believe in him) and be given the gift of eternal life.20 Even reason, the most beautiful and excellent of all things, is subject to the power of the devil. Anthropologically this implies that human beings, regardless of their social status and of the excellence they may achieve with regard to the goods of this life, remain guilty of sin, sentenced to death and oppressed by the devil. There follows a list of opinions that are incompatible with this view of the whole cause in each of the three senses to which we have referred; for it is the cause in the sense of being that from which motion is derived, in the sense of the purpose or final cause, and as being the substance of all bodies that have souls.’ Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. Loeb, Classical Library 288, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 87. 18  Thesis 17, p. 138. 19  Thesis 20, p. 138. 20  See thesis 23, p. 138.

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and perfect human being: the view that the capacities of humans remain intact after the Fall;21 the opinion that humans could merit the grace of God by doing what is in them (faciendo quod in se est: by relying on their inherent capacities); the notion that reason always strives towards the best;22 the view that the light of the face of God is in humans so that they can form a correct rule and a good will; the conviction that humans could choose between good and evil, life or death. If we try to summarise Luther’s list of refutations, it seems he offers a comprehensive list of all elements of the human capacity for action (deliberation, choice, will, execution) that are depicted as somehow independent of the relationship to God the creator. The argument formulates the rule: The relationship to God, be it as faith or as contradiction against God, as sin, determines human capacities or incapacities – and this rule applies both in an ontological (what are human capacities?) and an epistemological sense (how can I know what humans can do?). The positive view of the whole and perfect human being is then summarised in the thesis: ‘Paul in Romans 3[:28], “We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works,” briefly sums up the definition of man, saying, “Man is justified by faith.” ’23 There are a number of observations to be made about this thesis. First of all, Luther employs a scriptural argument. Theology is text-bound rationality, because it rests on the witness to divine revelation that is confirmed by the internal testimony of God, the Spirit.24 Secondly, if humans are justified by faith without works, this refers to God’s action that defines who, what and for what purpose humans are. Justice in this sense therefore cannot mean justice in a judicial sense, handing down judgment over the deeds of humans. It must be understood as radically creative justice, positing, recreating and perfecting the right relationship of humans to God over against which everything created is in itself, apart from God’s creative grace – nothing.25 Therefore, ‘faith’ in the definition hominem iustificari fide must refer thirdly, to the all-encompassing and total act of trust as the condition for human existence and right orientation, the act through which humans become ‘whole’ and ‘perfect’ in relation to God. This has also a negative implication that Luther mentions in the following theses 33 and 34 (p. 139). If one says that humans have to be justified, this implies that humans are without remainder sinners and guilty before God, but that they can be saved by grace. In this sense, everything we refer to when we say, ‘human being’  See thesis 26, p. 139.  This refers to Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, 1,13. 23 See thesis, 32, p. 139. 24 On the character of reason to be bound to text and tradition, see Adam Seligman and Suzanne L. Stone, “Text, Tradition, and Reason in Comparative Perspective. An Introduction”, Cardozo Law Review, 28/1 (2006): https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/faculty-articles/190/ (accessed 28 July 2020). 25  See Christoph Schwöbel, “Justice and Freedom. The Continuing Promise of the Reformation”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 59 (2017), pp. 595–614. 21 22

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or, indeed, ‘world’ is – apart from the relationship to God – ‘sin’. This presupposes that there is a categorical distinction between God and God’s action, and humans and human action. They are not to be related in a form in which nature and grace, reason and faith can somehow cooperate in the constitution of grace. There is, and that is the contrast to most medieval forms of relating divine and human action, no cooperative partial causation between God and humans on the same level. God’s being and action is the unconditional condition for the possibility of every human being and act. Positively, this means, Luther asserts, that human beings in this life are the pure matter of God for the future form of life (pura materia Dei ad futurae formae suae vitam).26 This status is then extended to the whole of creation which is God’s matter for its future glorious form. This radical passivity in the constitution of faith, which corresponds to the radically creative grace of God, leads to the constitution of the created activity of humans in cooperation with and enveloped by the purpose of God for creation. Fourthly, Luther reformulates the doctrine of the four causes by seeing God the creator, reconciler and consummator of creation, the one who from the beginning determines himself to achieve the perfected communion with his reconciled creation, as the efficient and final cause of everything that happens, who makes this life the material cause for actualising the future form of human life when the image of God will be reformed and perfected.27 In the interim, humans exist in the relationship of sin in a state of either being more justified or being more polluted, so that Paul is right to call the kingdoms of reason the schema of this world.28 With regard to what it means to be human, Luther not only presents a regionalised view of philosophy and reason whereby reason can be understood as inventor and governor in all worldly spheres, but not with regard to the origin and end of humans and the world. Rather, he seems to suggest that the whole practice of reason, the whole of human wisdom, is dependent on the wisdom that theology offers, wisdom that is grounded in God and God’s revelation and that is appropriated to humans by the self-revelation of God in Christ through the Spirit, as it is witnessed in Scripture and confirmed in the hearts of believers. Reason, so it seems, is always dependent on the primary orientation that deter26  Thesis 35, p. 139. There is an important existential dimension to this thesis. If reflection on human life is restricted to the perspective of philosophical reason, death is the point where human life becomes ‘whole’, and everything in human life becomes an anticipation of this point. If theology sees human life in its source, which is God (thesis 17, p. 138), it gains another understanding of human life as ‘whole and perfect’ (thesis 20, p. 138). Only by understanding human life ‘in its source’, can it be seen as ‘simple material of God for the form of his future life’ (thesis 25, p. 139). This explains why the question of the resurrection of the body had such paramount significance for Luther, as well as for Ghazālī and Judah Halevi. See, for instance, Lejla Demiri’s paper in this volume: “‘He Who has created death and life’ (Q 67:2). Death in Islamic Theology and Spirituality”. 27  See thesis 38, p. 140. 28  See thesis 40, p. 140.

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mines human life, on the wisdom that is not actively constituted by humans but constituted for humans, disclosed to them in the process of their lives and communicated to them by the created media of divine communication. For gaining true wisdom, reason, so it seems, does not have a constitutive role but an explicatory, hermeneutical role. It always has its foundation and its bounds in the intellectus fidei.

Discovering Analogies – Experimenting with Translations – Tracing Resonances In the context of doing theology in interreligious perspective and in conversation with Muslim scholars, Luther’s critique of philosophy seems strongly reminiscent of Ghazālī’s (d. 505/1111) criticism of the school of Fārābī (d. 339/950) and Ibn Sīnā/Avicenna (d. 428/1037) and his followers in Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’).29 For every one of the conventionally cited twenty counter-propositions against the views of the philosophers, one could find parallel statements from Luther’s works and the works of other Reformers, not only with regard to the eternity of the world, the subject of the tenth discussion,30 and the denial of the resurrection, the theme of the twentieth discussion,31 but also with regard to such highly technical points as the question of God’s knowledge of particulars, as it is debated both in the eleventh and thirteenth discussion.32 It is remarkable that Ghazālī, just like Luther, focuses his criticism on the Aristotelian theory of the human soul which had been further developed by Avicenna.33 It also has to be noted that Ghazālī’s criticism is of a very specific kind: He intends to demonstrate only the incoherence of the philosophers, either by showing that the premises from which they proceed are incompatible or that their syllogisms are wrong.34 Demonstrability is the sole criterion of 29  Al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura, Provo UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2000. Ghazālī explicitly states in his (first) introduction that he will confine himself to the criticism of Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. See ibid., p. 4. 30  Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence, pp. 123–4. 31  Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence, pp. 208–25. 32  Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence, pp. 125–31 and pp. 134–43 (God’s knowledge of tensed particulars). 33  Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence, pp. 178–200. 34  An excellent example of this kind of reasoning is discussion 18 (p. 22). Ghazālī responds to the criticism that one cannot doubt the conclusion, if one accepts the premises, provided the rules of syllogism are followed: ‘The answer is that we have written this book only to show the incoherence and inconsistency in the utterances of the philosophers. This has been achieved, since one of the two things have been contradicted – either what they said about the rational soul or what they have said about the estimative faculty. Moreover, this contradiction shows that they did not notice a place of confusion in (their) syllogism. Perhaps the place of confusion lies in their statement […]’. Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence, p. 184.

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the demonstration of the incoherence. The philosophers fail in what they most ardently try to achieve. Wherever the discussion points beyond that he proceeds by quotations from the Qur’an, not by developing an independent theological or philosophical argument. Ghazālī’s conclusions are therefore very specific. The three criticised doctrines are the pre-eternity of the world, the thesis that God’s knowledge does not encompass temporal particulars, and the denial of the resurrection of bodies. Then he continues: ‘A s regards questions other than these three, such as their treatment of the divine attributes and their belief in divine unity entailed therein, their doctrine is close to that of the Muʿtazila.’35 A similar point has to be made with regard to the Sefer ha-Kuzari of the Jewish thinker and important Sephardic poet Judah Halevi (d. 1141).36 The narrative frame of the book is the story of the conversion of the king of the Khazars and his people to Judaism. The king had been made aware by an angel in a recurrent dream that God is pleased with his intentions but not with his actions. In order to find a reliable orientation that connects right intentions with right actions, the king invites first an (Aristotelian) philosopher, then Christian and Muslim scholars for conversations, until he is finally convinced of the right way to understand his place before God and in the world by a rabbi, a Jewish sage. Looking at the philosopher’s arguments, one has the feeling that he must also be regarded as a pupil of Ibn Sīnā, perhaps one of his disciples, and the convergence between the criticism of this philosophy in Ghazālī’s and in Judah Halevi’s work is at times striking. The philosopher roundly criticises the king’s dream, because a God who is displeased would lack something and that is incompatible with the plenitude and perfection of the divine nature. God also cannot know particulars, and therefore God can know neither the Kuzari nor his deeds. He is, in the opinion of the philosophers, above knowledge of individuals, because the latter change with times, whilst there is no change in God’s knowledge. He, therefore does not know thee, much less thy thoughts and actions, nor does He listen to thy prayers, or see thy movements.37

As if he wanted to duplicate Ghazālī’s description of philosophy in the school of Avicenna, the philosopher continues to deny the creation of the world, insisting that there cannot be a divine will, everything has to be explained in terms of emanations from a Prime Cause: ‘For the world is without beginning […] Everything is reduced to a Prime Cause; not a Will proceeding from this, but an 35 Al-Ghazālī,

Incoherence, p. 226. most extensive scholarly article on Jehuda Halevi is: Barry Kogan, “Judah Halevi”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/halevi/ (accessed 28 July 2020). A convenient book edition is: Judah Halevi, The Kuzari. An Argument for the Faith of Israel, Introduction by Henri Slonimsky, New York NY: Schocken Books, 1964 (This is the English translation from the Arabic by Hartwig Hirschfeld.) 37  Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, p. 36. 36 The

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Emanation from which emanated a second, a third and fourth cause.’38 The destiny of humans is to achieve union with the active intellect, for which religions can, at best, have an auxiliary function. In the further conversations, Christians and Muslims are not able to alleviate the persistent doubt of the Kuzari. This is only achieved by the rabbi who counters the rational arguments with arguments based on personal experience and tradition. It is the reliability of a historical revelation which alone can provide an orientation in life and allows human beings to connect motivations and actions in following the divinely given law. The views of the philosophers must be explained as the mind; human rationality overextending itself. This is clearly manifested in the rabbi’s judgment on Aristotle: ‘He exerted his mind, because he had no tradition from any reliable source at his disposal.’39 It is on prophetic authority, that the creation of the world can be believed as an act of the divine will and that the resurrection of the dead can be hoped for. Henry Slonimsky is surely right when he paraphrases Halevi’s insistence on divine revelation in the following way: The point of departure is always with God: the genuine religious experience or event is always due to the spontaneity, the free grace, the self-revelation of God. It is he who reaches out and seeks man. Revelation alone then establishes the true, the real religion […] The God of philosophy remains the far-off unmoved goal towards which man aspires and towards which he raises himself by his own cognitive efforts. The God of religion does not remain at rest in self-sufficiency, but reaches out actively and with solicitude to call and raise man to himself.40

There are significant areas of overlap between Ghazālī’s, Halevi’s and Luther’s respective critiques of philosophy and their insistence on the importance of divine revelation, their refutation of the fourfold scheme of causes and their insistence on the immediate effective presence of God for and in His creation. All three, Ghazālī, Halevi and Luther, assign causal power to human actions, but they insist that this is strictly to be understood as a power God creates in humanity. Such created power, however, has no causal efficacy. It has no control over the effects of its actions because that remains a prerogative of the Creator. The reliability of the order of creation is not due to the inherent causal powers of creation, but to the faithfulness of the Creator, upholding and maintaining the order he created. A common element of the criticism of philosophy between all three religious thinkers is that philosophy oversteps its boundaries as the exercise of created reason when it tries to develop a coherent picture of God the Creator. If God is truly the Creator, not only of the being of all that is not God, but also of all knowledge, all meaning and fulfilment in creation, then it seems logical to suppose that God can only be known where God gives Godself to be known  Ibid.  Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, p. 56. 40  ‘Introduction’ to The Kuzari, pp. 17–31, 27. 38 39

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in God’s revelation. Trying to know God apart from God’s revelation, by means of human reason alone, appears in this way as an attempt to usurp the place of God, as an exercise in the self-aggrandisement of the human over against God which distorts the true relationship between God the Creator and the human creature. Ultimately, such a claim appears as idolatry and is criticised as such. It is the claim on the part of philosophy – and one always has to keep in mind one particular philosophical school – to offer a total explanation of God and the world in their relationship that provokes the religious criticism of our three theological thinkers. It is important that they do not counter such an arrogant claim by asserting equally totalitarian claims for theology or religion. On the contrary, theology remains subordinate and subservient to God’s revelation. Giving glory to God in his revelation requires an attitude of epistemic modesty, religiously speaking, of humility. For theological anthropology this means that it can only be exercised in a spirit of gratitude which exercises modesty and humility by seeing the key to the place of humans in the cosmos as a place they have been given by God as God’s gifted creatures. This is a point that needs to be observed whenever theological anthropology engages in interdisciplinary conversations with other anthropological disciplines. Further similarities appear where the relationship between God and everything that is not God is seen as a personal communicative relationship which calls for replacing the paradigm of causality as the frame of all God-worldrelations with a paradigm of communication. One can even find many systematic resonances of Luther’s view that the trust of one’s affective centre, the heart, understood as a relational organ, determines what kind of God we have, both in Ghazālī and in Halevi. For Ghazālī, the search for certainty of the heart (qalb) seems to have been the guiding motive of his life’s journey from the methods of jurisprudence to rational theology and ultimately to mystical experience. Many interesting historical questions are generated by these analogies, by testing translations and by tracing the resonances through the different traditions. For doing theological anthropology in interreligious perspective there are, moreover, a number of systematic resonances which offer plenty of questions for further conversations. The rich history of the interaction of the theologies of the three Abrahamic faiths and their respective critical engagement with philosophy offers a plenitude of resources for our contemporary endeavour to establish a theological dialogue between the faith traditions.41 One of the most conspicuous similarities between all three theological critiques of philosophy is that they employ philosophical methods and arguments confidently and competently, in 41  See Christoph Schwöbel, “Denkender Glaube. Strukturmomente des christlichen Glaubens und die Praxis christlicher Theologie im Gespräch mit islamischer Theologie”, Zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft. Theologie in Christentum und Islam (Theologisches Forum Christentum – Islam, 2014), ed. M. Gharaibeh, et al., Regensburg: Pustet, 2015, pp. 69–95.

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order to criticise the claims of philosophy to be able to give a complete definition of the human. Does philosophy then lose in the theological criticism that is offered in different ways by Luther, Ghazālī and Halevi? All three insist that they do not dispute the use of reason in mundane matters. Their quarrel is not with the philosophers’ mathematics, their astronomical investigations or even their logic, as it is applied to the created world. They challenge the extension of metaphysical principles to the being of God in such a way that God is just another case of the application of universal principles of explanation. If that happens, the distortion will not only extend to the understanding of God, but also to the interpretation of what it means to be human. What, then, is the promise that is contained in the criticism of philosophy that insists that human wisdom is always dependent on divine wisdom, that human rationality is not a science of first principles, but a practice governed by wisdom? What do we gain for our understanding of the correlation between being human and knowing the human through the insistence that human reason is always created, finite and fallible, dependent on finding orientation in divine revelation, always communicative, formed by a pattern of address and response, always historical, mediated through historical events and their interconnected narratives, always embodied, and not abstracted from a material creation, always social, cultivated in communal forms of sociality? One clear gain that seems reasonable to expect is that the move from abstract reason to embedded rationality, also in matters of theological explication, helps to focus on the practice of reason, instead of making theoretical claims about the principle of reason. Tracing these resonances might also lead from scholarly investigations to discovering practical opportunities for cooperation between our different communities and the traditions they try to cultivate. The promise offered for conversations tracing these resonances seems to be contained in a common conviction the three thinkers mentioned certainly shared: Feuerbach’s maxim, ‘dass das Geheimnis der Theologie die Anthropologie ist’,42 must be reversed in order to make sense of the human: Theologie ist das Geheimnis der Anthropologie.

Bibliography Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (1998). Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. Loeb, Classical Library 288, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. 42  Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974, p. 10 (from the preface to the first edition 1841).

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Ebeling, Gerhard, Lutherstudien, Bd. II. Disputatio de Homine. Erster Teil. Text und Traditionshintergrund, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977. Ebeling, Gerhard, Zweiter Teil. Die philosophische Definition des Menschen. Kommentar zu These 1–19, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982. Ebeling, Gerhard, Dritter Teil. Die theologische Definition des Menschen. Kommentar zu These 20–40, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989. Feuerbach, Ludwig, Das Wesen des Christentums, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974. Ghazālī, al-, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura, Provo UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2000. Halevi, Judah, The Kuzari. An Argument for the Faith of Israel. Introduction by Henri Slonimsky, New York NY: Schocken Books Inc, 1964. Luther, Martin, Luther’s Works. Vol. 34. Career of the Reformer IV, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Lewis W. Spitz, St. Louis MI: Concordia Publishing House, 1960. Kogan, Barry, “Judah Halevi”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/ halevi/ (accessed 28 July 2020). Schwöbel, Christoph, “Talking over the Fence. From Toleration to Dialogue”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 45 (2003), pp. 115–30. Schwöbel, Christoph, “Denkender Glaube. Strukturmomente des christlichen Glaubens und die Praxis christlicher Theologie im Gespräch mit islamischer Theologie”, Zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft: Theologie in Christentum und Islam (Theologisches Forum Christentum  – Islam 2014), ed. M. Gharaibeh, et al., Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2015, pp. 69–95. Schwöbel, Christoph, “Justice and Freedom. The Continuing Promise of the Reformation”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 59 (2017), pp. 595–614. Seligman, Adam and Stone, Suzanne L., “Text, Tradition, and Reason in Comparative Perspective. An Introduction”, Cardozo Law Review, 28/1 (2006): https://larc.cardozo. yu.edu/faculty-articles/190/ (accessed 28 July 2020). Taylor, Charles, “Self-Interpreting Animals”, Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 45–76.

Multiplex Human Ontology and Multiplex Self An Alternative Understanding of Human Behaviour Recep Şentürk1 Human ontology, self, and human action, I argue, have multiple layers. By demonstrating this, I aim to offer an alternative to the presently dominant uniplex or reductionist approaches in philosophy, theology and the social sciences to human ontology, self and action. In this multiplexity, I argue that we must make a distinction between mind and soul following the long traditions of sufi thought. The mind is part of the empirical world and thus subject to empirical study, while the soul is part of the metaphysical world and thus it can be a subject of empirical study only with respect to its impact on moral qualities, attitudes and behavioural outcomes. This paper addresses four interrelated questions from the perspective of Islamic theological anthropology, deriving mainly from Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), with the purpose of demonstrating that it is characterised by multiplexity. What is a human being? What is the self ? What is human action? How can we explain the cause of social action from the perspective of a multiplex human ontology and the self ? I argue that the answers from the perspective of Islamic anthropology to the above questions reflect a multiplex approach to human existence, the self and action, which offers us a potentially more fecund understanding of human behaviour as a result of the changing configuration of conflictual relations among these layers.

What is a Human Being? The search for self-knowledge in human beings has given rise to an unending quest and debate since the early history of philosophy, religion, and the social sciences. Until the rise of modern and postmodern versions of materialism and 1  I thank Lejla Demiri from Tübingen University and the members of the Istanbul Circle at Ibn Haldun University for inspiring me to write this paper. My special thanks go to Harun Jeroen Vlug and Maria Taiai from the Alliance of Civilizations Institute at Ibn Haldun University for their comments on this article.

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positivism, the usual answer, which was accepted by the majority of world religions and civilisations, was a multiplex one. This was based on the acceptance that human beings had a body and a soul, although they differed on their understanding of them and the roles they assigned to them. However, materialists, since ancient times, have rejected this dualism and have argued that it is only the body that makes a human being what he is. Idealists, on the other hand, have argued the opposite, because for them what truly makes a human being is the soul or mind. Some, like René Descartes (d. 1650), accepted the existence of the dualism of body and mind. This primordial and well-known debate still goes on between idealists, materialists and those who accept the dualism of body and mind.2 Philosopher of mind Colin McGinn acknowledges that the problem defies our scientific and philosophical efforts: We have been trying for a long time to solve the mind-body problem. It has stubbornly resisted our best efforts. The mystery persists. I think the time has come to admit candidly that we cannot resolve the mystery. But I also think that this very insolubility – or the reason for it – removes the philosophical problem.3

McGinn humbly confesses how limited our progress has been even in formulating the mind-body problem, quite apart from understanding and solving it: One of the peculiarities of the mind-body problem is the difficulty of formulating it in a rigorous way. We have a sense of the problem that outruns our capacity to articulate it clearly. Thus, we quickly find ourselves resorting to invitations to look inward, instead of specifying precisely what it is about consciousness that makes it inexplicable in terms of ordinary physical properties. And this can make it seem that the problem is spurious. A creature without consciousness would not properly appreciate the problem (assuming such a creature could appreciate other problems). I think an adequate treatment of the mind-body problem should explain why it is so hard to state the problem explicitly. My treatment locates our difficulty in our inadequate conceptions of the nature of brain and consciousness. In fact, if we knew their natures fully, we would already have solved the problem.4

My purpose here is not to analyse these standpoints and their limitations, but to argue that we need to go beyond the mind-body dualism by adopting a multiplex 2  ‘The mind-body problem has its origins in Plato, its continuing importance in Cartesian philosophy, its psychological ramifications in behaviourism and cognitivism, its novel twists in artificial intelligence, and its scientific demystification in functional brain-imaging technology.’ Morton Wagman, Cognitive Science and the Mind-Body Problem. From Philosophy to Psychology to Artificial Intelligence to Imaging of the Brain, Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998, p. 11. Wagman seems to be unaware of the debates in Islamic philosophy and the sufi literature which I will be exploring in this paper. 3  Colin McGinn, “Can we Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”, Mind, 98/391 (1989), pp. 349–66, at p. 349. 4  Ibid.

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approach.5 Here I offer such a multiplex approach which derives from Islamic theological anthropology, which is open to integrating the empirically proven or philosophically well-grounded insights of materialists, idealists and dualists, but goes beyond them by rejecting their reductionism and also by refuting the dichotomies they create. A great thinker to turn to for a different perspective, which goes beyond this dualism, is Ghazālī, whose answer to this question establishes that there are three levels in human ontology: body, mind and soul.6 This view has been commonly shared by most Muslim scholars over the centuries and across diverse schools of thought.7 If Ghazālī, and other Muslim scholars, as I will demonstrate below, conceptualised human ontology as consisting of three levels, then this brings to mind the following questions: What are body, mind and soul? And what are their interrelations? How do their relations translate into human action? These are grand questions. Yet, within the limits of this paper, I will try to briefly address them. The complexity of the issue is well illustrated by the Turkish Ottoman sufi scholar and philosopher Erzurumlu Ibrahim Hakki (d. 1194/1780) who writes as follows: A human being has two souls. Muslim philosophers called one of them the animal soul and the other human soul. What they call the animal soul is an essence, a subtle vapour which carries on life in the body, sense perception and in voluntary motions. We (sufis) call this soul the appetitive or animal soul (nafs). This soul is an essence born into the bodies. If it is born both inside and outside of the body, the state of awakening occurs. Yet if it is born only inside the body and not outside, then sleep occurs. If this soul completely departs from the body, then death occurs.8

Hakki draws our attention to two schools of anthropology in Islam: ‘Philosophy’ (falsafa) and ‘Sufism’ (taṣawwuf). The philosophers were influenced by Greek philosophy and tried to combine it with an Islamic approach to human ontology.9 I should also note here that ‘philosophers’ in this context refers also to natural scientists and medical doctors, because during the Middle Ages ‘philosopher’ 5  For a survey of Western debates on the problem of mind-body dualism over time, see D. M.  Armstrong, The Mind-Body Problem. An Opinionated Introduction, Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1999. 6  For a biographical overview of Ghazālī’s life, see Eric Ormsby, Ghazali, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. For more on his theological views and positions, see Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. 7 For a survey of the views of Muslim scholars in the Ashʿarī, Māturīdī and Muʿtazilī schools, and also philosophers like Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī and Mulla Sadra, on human ontology, see İnsan Nedir? İslam Düşüncesinde İnsan Tasavvurları, ed. Ömer Türker and İbrahim Halil Üçer, Istanbul: İLEM yayınları, 2019. Also see, Deborah L. Black, “Psychology. Soul and Intellect”, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 308–26. 8  İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumlu, Mârifetnâme, Istanbul: Erkam Yayınları, 2011, vol. 3, p. 268. 9  A classic introduction to the school of falsafa is Majid Fakhry’s A History of Islamic Philosophy, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2004.

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was used as a common name for them all. For example, what philosophers call human soul is the rational soul (al-nafs al-nāṭiqa) which is an abstract essence separate from the material world, it being linked to the material world only through its actions. This soul or the ‘heart’ (qalb) acquires different names when its attributes change: the ruling (al-ammāra), the self-critical (al-lawwāma), the divinely-inspired (al-mulhama), the content (al-muṭmaʾinna), the pleased (alrāḍiya), the pleasing (al-marḍiyya) and the perfected (al-kāmila). These names are used to indicate the changing attributes or the states of the soul or heart. This is how Muslim scholars name the soul variously as the levels of the self, which is based on the changing states and attributes of the soul.10 In total, Hakki mentions seven levels of the self. Here, changes in the soul reflect as changes in morality and behaviour (sulūk), which is the goal of the sufis. The sufi interest in the soul is primarily aimed at reforming human morality and behaviour. Hakki mentions the different levels of human ontology as follows: The rational soul is also called the heart. It is the one that knows the world, it is addressed by God and is held responsible. Its external appearance and its vessel is the aforementioned appetitive soul. It has an inside which is the soul, while the inside of the soul is the secret (al-sirr), the inside of the secret is the secret of the secret (sirr al-sirr), the inside of the secret of the secret is the hidden (al-khafī), and finally the inside of the hidden is the most hidden (al-akhfā).11

Multiplex human existence stands like a bridge between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Hakki explains that the human body belongs to the physical world. Yet the human soul has levels in ascending order from the animal soul to ‘the most hidden’ (al-akhfā), depending on their closeness to divine reality. In descending order, this is how Hakki introduces nine immaterial components or metaphysical faculties of human beings. One important difference between the philosophers and the sufis is that the philosophers were not interested in the levels of the soul, as their primary focus was the body. Kamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī (d. 736/1335), a sufi scholar from the fourteenth century,12 writes that ‘[t]he philosophers do not make a distinction between the two types of soul and call both the rational soul’.13 10  For more on the concepts of changing states (aḥwāl) and stations (maqāmāt) in Islam, see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975, pp. 109–30. 11 Erzurumlu, Mârifetnâme, vol. 3, pp. 268–9. 12 Qāshānī wrote prominent works on sufi Qur’anic exegesis (ishārī tafsīr) and sufi technical terminology (iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya). For more on sufi terminology, see Mustafa Kara, “Books About Sufi Terminology”, Sufism and Sufis in Ottoman Society. Sources, Doctrines, Rituals, Turuq, Architecture, Literature, Iconography, Modernism, ed. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2005, pp. 51–64. 13  Kamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, Iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya, ed. Muḥammad Kamāl Ibrāhīm Jaʿfar, Cairo: Al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Kitāb, 1981, p. 151.

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The writings of the philosophers and the sufis gave rise to two different genres regarding human ontology. Below I will demonstrate the concept of body, mind, and soul in Islamic anthropology, mainly drawing on the works of Ghazālī. Yet at the outset, I should note that Ghazālī uses four terms as synonymous in some contexts: soul, heart, intellect (or reason) and self. He also warns that these terms may have separate meanings in some contexts, thus the reader should determine the meaning of the term under question depending on the context. Ghazālī sees this ambiguity in the terminology as a source of enormous confusion among religious scholars and students. I will also be using the terms ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably. However, I will use the ‘self ’ only to denote the changing states of the heart or the soul which are used to explain variation in behaviour.14

Ghazālī on the Body As Ghazālī says, both human beings and animals have bodies, and both have desires, anger, knowledge, and willpower. The difference and superiority of human beings over other creatures does not arise from their bodies, but rather from their minds and their souls15 which make them capable of theoretical reasoning, wisdom and rational judgement based on the final consequences of events. Animals and humans share the will of desires (irādat al-shahwa) which is short term, but only humans have the will of reason (irādat al-ʿaql) which takes into account long term consequences. Animals and humans also share knowledge, but animal knowledge is limited to the visible world and particulars as they are unable to extrapolate universals from their observations. The heart of the human being possesses a special type of knowledge which distinguishes him from other living creatures and even from children in the early phases of their lives (as they only gain it after puberty).16 Ghazālī observes that the theologians and sufis do not see studying the body as their primary interest, because it is not the main concern of the travellers in the 14  Ghazālī argues that there are four words in Arabic used to indicate the concept of the soul. These are: soul (rūḥ), heart (qalb), intellect (ʿaql) and self (nafs). These words are used synonymously for the concept of the soul, but at the same time they also have other distinctive meanings. The readers have to pay attention to the context to determine which meaning is appropriate, lest confusion may arise. Translating these words into English is also a complicated issue. Nafs is the most problematic one, because it is used to indicate more than one meaning, namely: (1) the human being, (2) the soul, (3) the appetitive self and (4) the heart. It is variously translated into English as self, soul, ego and the like. One should also add the word fuʾād for the heart, which frequently occurs in the Qur’an. Ghazālī uses heart (qalb) more frequently than the others for soul in his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. Below I will follow Ghazālī’s usage. Needless to say, what is meant here is the spiritual and not the physical heart. 15  Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2015, vol. 5, pp. 30–1. 16  Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 31–4.

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spiritual path to God and the Hereafter. Therefore, he argues, studying the body should be left to the medical doctors and the knowledge they produce is sufficient for the disciple of the spiritual path to use in case he needs medical assistance. Consequently, his writings reflect the common understanding of his time about the body and its functions. Yet his major contribution is on the spiritual making of human beings and its relationship to the human body and actions. What is striking for a modern reader is that Ghazālī, like others of his time, accepts that there are two souls in human beings: one soul is the source of biological life and belongs to the material world, while the other is the source of spiritual life and belongs to the metaphysical world.17 Medical doctors study the first type of soul as they are more interested in biological life, while the theologians and sufis study the latter as they are primarily interested in the moral life. Therefore Ghazālī, who was not involved in biology or medicine, leaves the first type of soul to medical science, and focuses on the metaphysical soul. When he uses the term soul, he refers to the second principle.18 He states that the metaphysical soul is not subject to empirical study because it does not belong to the material and visible world.19 The body is however controlled by the metaphysical soul. Bodily limbs are soldiers or servants of the soul because they receive commands from the soul and act accordingly. But the relationship is not one way; bodily needs are also communicated to the soul. Therefore there exists a two-way communication between body and soul. Ghazālī uses several metaphors to illustrate the relationship between the body and the soul: the body is the kingdom, the army, the vessel, and the ship of the soul. The immediate connection between body and soul is through two points: the physical heart and the brain. ‘The spiritual heart has a connection with the physical heart’.20 The spiritual heart is connected to the body as a whole and uses it, but one of the primary points it connects with the body is through the physical heart. Plainly put, the immediate connections of the soul or the spiritual heart are to the physical heart. ‘The physical heart is the place, the kingdom, the world 17 This view may be traced back to antiquity and the ancient theory of the three levels of life and soul: the vegetative soul (al-rūḥ al-nabātī), the animal soul (al-rūḥ al-ḥayawānī) and the human soul (al-rūḥ al-insānī). This theory is based on the understanding that there are three parallel and interrelated levels of existence and life emanating from a soul peculiar to this level (Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Tahānawī, Mawsūʿa kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn wa-l-ʿulūm, ed. Rafīq al-ʿAjm et al., Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1996, vol. 2, p. 1414). I should also add here that in the Islamic scriptures (Qur’an and Hadith) qualities of living beings, such as communication, memory and glorifying God, are attributed to nonhuman beings as well. Therefore, I suggest, it would not be misleading to add a fourth type of soul: the material soul (al-rūḥ al-māddī). Ghazālī also sees human beings as constituted of plant and animal life (Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, p. 36). 18  Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 15–16. 19  Ibid., vol. 5, p. 74. 20  Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 14, 19.

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and the vessel of the spiritual heart’.21 However, Ghazālī does not elaborate on this relationship as much as he does on the relationship which exists between the spiritual heart (or the soul) and the brain. He explains in detail how the body cannot directly communicate with the soul but needs the mediation of the mind or the brain. The body and its limbs (eyes, feet, hands etc.) are visible soldiers of the heart or the soul along with the invisible armies of the heart, such as knowledge, desires, and anger. The heart uses the limbs for two purposes: drawing benefit and repelling harm. There exists a circular relationship between body and soul.22 The senses collect data from the external world and convey them to the mind. Bodily needs and desires are also conveyed to the mind. The mind analyses these data and transfers them to the heart through the animal self (nafs). In an ideal scenario, reason should check and filter such data from senses and the demands from the body before they go to the heart. This may happen in a case where reason is triumphant over the animal self. Here the heart makes its decision to act upon it and communicates its will to the limbs through the brain to be realised by the body. The body may also use additional tools such as weapons or instruments to realise the will of the heart.23

Ghazālī on the Mind According to Ghazālī, the soul connects to the body through the brain (dimāgh) which we today call the mind. Thus, for Ghazālī, the brain (or the mind) is not the ultimate command centre of human existence and life. The mind is only a mediator between the soul and the body, in particular in three areas: (1) The information collected by the five senses first goes to the brain. (2) Biological needs and desires of the body are first conveyed to the brain. (3) Commands for action reflecting the human will to act in a particular way come first to the brain from the soul.

21 Ibid.,

vol. 5, p. 19.  Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) explains this circular relationship as follows under the title of ‘Admonition concerning the effect of the soul on the body, and vice versa’. He writes: ‘Has it not become clear to you that the dispositions that primarily belong to the soul are such that dispositions may proceed downward from them to bodily powers? Similarly, the dispositions that primarily belong to the bodily powers are such that dispositions proceed upward from them and reach the soul itself. How could it not have become clear to you when you know that a frightened person experiences failure of appetite, disorder in digestion, and powerlessness to perform natural acts that were possible’ (Shams Inati, Ibn Sina and Mysticism. Remarks and Admonitions. Part Four, London: Kegan Paul International, 1996, pp. 92–3). 23  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, pp. 23–5. 22

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The mind is also the locus of some of the rational faculties because the data gathered by sense perception goes to the brain where they are then processed and analysed to a particular extent and stored. From ancient times until today the meaning of mind, including its functions and the ways through which it is related to the body, has always been an extremely controversial issue. Some even deny the existence of the mind as a separate phenomenon apart from the physical brain. However, following the commonly accepted view, it is possible to define mind as the emerging qualities and functions of the brain.24 Furthermore, philosophers accept that there is a mental level of existence (al-wujūd al-dhihnī). The Ottoman polymath Katip Çelebi (also known as Ḥājjī Khalīfa, d. 1068/1657) in his bibliographic encyclopedia Kashf al-ẓunūn, and the Ottoman historian and encyclopedist Taşköprüzâde (d. 968/1561), in his Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, both give special attention to disciplines studying the level of ‘mental existence’ in their ontological taxonomy of the sciences.25 Logic is one of the disciplines that studies subjects that have only mental existence. Arabic linguists also accept that there is a mental level of existence (al-wujūd al-dhihnī). It is used to explain the definite (maʿrifa) usage of words (al-ahd al-dhihnī) which must be related to memory in the mind.26 The mind may be seen as closely corresponding to what is traditionally called the animal soul, the source of biological life. It is considered that the human soul is a heavenly entity which is beyond space and measurement. However, the animal soul in human beings (al-rūḥ al-ḥayawānī al-basharī) belongs to the created physical world (ʿālam al-khalq) and is subject to space and measurement. It is the vessel of the higher soul. The animal soul is a subtle substance which carries sense perception and motion and resides in the heart.27 Therefore, we can conclude that the animal soul in human beings, or mind, is subject to empirical study, while the human soul is not. The mind with its five external and five internal senses is one of the soldiers of the heart and is situated in the brain.28 It produces knowledge, comprehension and consciousness, and thus introduces the world to the heart. Every human being has five external senses to collect data for the mind from the external world and also five internal senses to analyse and store this data. The five internal senses include the following: (1) joint sense perception (al-ḥiss almushtarak), (2) imagination (takhayyul), (3) thinking (tafakkur), (4) remembering (tadhakkur), and (5) memory (ḥifẓ). These exist inside the brain as its

 Mind is usually translated to Turkish as zihin, from the Arabic word dhihn.  Ahmad ibn Mustafa Taşköprüzâde, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda fī mawdūʿāt al-ʿulūm, Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2010, p 55; Katip Çelebi, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī l-kutub wa-l-funūn, ed. M. Şerefettin Yaltkaya, Ankara: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1941, p. 35. 26  Tahānawī, Mawsūʿa, vol. 1, pp. 830–1. 27 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 878. 28  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, pp. 24–5. 24 25

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functions. Ghazālī says that if God had not created these qualities in the brain, the brain would be empty of them and be like a piece of meat.29 The ultimate happiness is in the following: [making one’s] meeting with God, the Exalted, his highest goal; the Hereafter, his eternal abode; this world, his transitory station; the body, his vessel; and the limbs, his servants. Consequently, the consciousness of man dwells in the heart as a king in the midst of his kingdom. He employs the imaginative faculty, whose seat is in the front of the brain, as the master of his couriers, for the reports of sense perceptions (maḥsūsāt) are gathered therein. He employs the faculty of retentive memory (ḥāfiẓa), whose seat is the back of the brain, as his store-keeper. He uses the tongue as his interpreter and the active members of his body as his scribes. He uses the five senses as his spies, and it makes each one of them responsible in a certain domain.30

The heart functions as the king in the kingdom of body and mind. Ghazālī compares the operations of a human being with the operations of a state: Thus he appoints the eye over the world of colours, hearing over the world of sounds, smell over the world of odours, and so on for the others. These are the bearers of news that they collect from their different worlds and transmit to the imaginative faculty, which is like the master of the couriers. The latter in turn delivers them to the store-keeper, which is memory. The store-keeper sets them forth before the king, who selects therefrom that which he has need of in managing his kingdom, in completing the journey ahead of him, in subjugating his enemy by whom he is afflicted, and in warding off from himself those who cut off his path. If [the king] does this he is successful, happy, and thankful for the blessings of God, the Exalted.31

This is the ideal scenario which may not always work because not everyone is successful in managing the powers given to his control. Marshalling all the powers which subsist in human beings as an army requires great self-discipline and an effort which most people lack.

Ghazālī on the Soul (or the Heart) What separates human beings from other creatures and puts them at the top of the hierarchy of creatures, second only to the angels, is the human soul (rūḥ) which is also called the heart (qalb) or the self (nafs).32 The body is the ship of the soul while the soul is the vessel of knowledge. The most important knowledge is  Ibid., vol. 5, p. 25.

29

30 Ibid., vol. 5, p. 36. I revised the above translation from the Marvels of the Heart (Al-Ghazali,

The Marvels of the Heart, trans. Walter James Skellie, Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2010, p. 26), relying on the Dār al-Minhāj edition of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. 31  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, p. 36; Al-Ghazali, The Marvels of the Heart, p. 26. 32  In the Qur’an it is mentioned that people are given very limited knowledge about the soul because it is a divine affair or a divine command or a metaphysical entity belonging to the World of Divine Command (ʿālam al-amr) (Q 17:85). Therefore Ghazālī says that we cannot empirically or rationally know the essence of the soul – unless we are blessed with access to

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the knowledge of God which comes through the knowledge of the self. Knowing God is the ultimate purpose of the human being for which he is created and the ability to achieve this is his distinct quality.33 This goal could be achieved only by the heart.34 The human being is a plant with respect to eating and reproducing; he is an animal with respect to sense perception and voluntary motion. He is a form similar to a picture painted on the wall with respect to his form and shape. His distinct quality is the knowledge about the truth of things.35

Ghazālī, following other Muslim scholars and philosophers, shares the view that the human soul belongs to the metaphysical world (ʿālam al-malakūt). Hence it cannot be a subject for empirical or rational research and study, and the only way to know it is through the purification of the self, which leads to the opening of the eye of the heart that unveils metaphysical reality (kashf). This may be called spiritual epistemology and methodology, which constitutes yet another level in the multiplex epistemology of Muslim scholars commonly known as marātib alʿulūm (the degrees of the sciences). In fact, Ghazālī outlines detailed arguments to ground this spiritual epistemology along with the rational epistemology of philosophy and the religious-rational epistemology of theology.36 The soul is hidden in itself while it is manifest with its actions. Although the mind and sense perception cannot grasp the essence of the soul, they can observe and study its implications and manifestations in human thought and actions. The soul is hidden in itself but manifest in its actions on the body which uses it as a tool to exercise its will. The soul is like a powerful king who hides himself from his subjects but acts through his retainers and soldiers. The purpose of studying the soul is not to understand its true nature or essence but to grasp its attributes and changing states. There are two reasons for this: first, practical morality does not require it; and second, it belongs to the secret knowledge of the prophets and saints which is not disclosed to common people.37 In relation to practical morality and piety one does not need to know the essence of the soul or the heart. Nor does one need to know the essence of Satan to avoid his harm, as one does not need to know the essence of an enemy to defend oneself against him. The heart is what is addressed and held accountable by God, because it is the heart that knows, believes, decides and wills. Intentions are what God looks at and they emerge in the heart and become materialised into actions by the body. divine knowledge through spiritual cleansing – but we can study its states and attributes (see al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, pp. 14–5). 33  Ibid., vol. 5, p. 34. 34 For more on the concept of qalb, see Sara Sviri, “The Niche of Light”, The Taste of Hidden Things. Images on the Sufi Path, Iverness CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1997, pp. 1–22. 35  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, vol. 5, p. 36. 36 Ibid., vol. 5, p. 84. 37  Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 14–5.

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The heart is not fixed and stagnant. Instead, it is open to continuous change, conflict and evolution. What is most striking in Ghazālī’s account of the heart is the conflict between the two faculties of the heart: reason (ʿaql) and the appetitive self (al-nafs al-shahwāniyya). The appetitive self rebels against alignment with reason in the service of the heart. The relationship between reason and self is decisive with regard to human character and action. The heart is networked with the physical, metaphysical and social worlds through reason and the appetitive self which are linked to the mind. And the mind is linked to the five senses which mediate between the mind and the physical world. In the metaphysical world, the relationship of Satan with the appetitive self (nafs) and the relationship of the angels with reason play an important role in the actions of the heart, embodied in the intentions and will, and eventually in the actions of the body. Society’s influence is also mediated through reason and the appetitive self. According to Ghazālī, the soul is an independent metaphysical essence and does not have its seat in the body, the physical heart or the brain, but it is networked with them all. This is unlike some of the theories which assume that the soul is in the heart or the brain. Yet the heart is linked to different levels of existence through them. The heart is a centre of attraction by different actors from different levels of existence: So it is, as it were, a target that is being hit constantly from every direction. Whenever a thing hits the heart, it influences it, and it is also hit from another direction by an opposing influence, so that its character is changed. If a demon comes to the heart and calls it to desire, there comes also an angel to drive it away. If a demon entices it to one evil, another demon entices it to another. If an angel attracts it to one sort of good, another angel attracts it to some other good. So at one time it is torn between two angels, at another between two demons, and at another between an angel and a demon. It is never left alone at all.38

The heart is like a battlefield and this continues until one reaches a state of peace by making reason control all agents upon it.

The Multiplex Self as the Source of Action Thus far I have sketched out an argument which suggests that an Islamic anthropology, a multiplex human ontology of body, mind and soul, can give rise to a multiplex concept of the self which is based on its constantly changing inner conflicts and reconfigurations. Now we can explore how this concept of the multiplex self is used to understand and explain the cause(s) of human action. In order to understand the causal relationship between a multiplex self and action we need to closely examine the theory of the levels of the self and its practical outcomes in the form of moral attributes and social action. Simply put, the levels of the self are an outcome of the conflict between the intellect and the appetitive  Al-Ghazali, The Marvels of the Heart, p. 131.

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self. It is like a proxy war between the angel using the intellect and Satan using the appetitive self.39 Most commonly it is accepted that there are seven levels of the self. It would distract our attention and exceed the limits of this paper if we were to indulge in its details here, because there exists a rich literature and discussion about it which has been produced over many centuries across the Muslim world. However, for our purpose here, it is possible to reduce them to three major levels depending on the phases of the conflict between reason and the appetitive self: (1) Al-nafs al-ammāra: the ruling appetitive self (2) Al-nafs al-lawwāma: the self-critical self (3) Al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna: the content self We can now take a brief look at the behavioural outcome of each self. Firstly, al-nafs al-ammāra: ‘the ruling appetitive self ’. At this level, the appetitive self, which is the voice of desires, rules the heart. This is reflected, at the empirical level, in certain moral qualities and behaviour. The appetitive self subjugates the intellect and uses it in its service, which is considered to be the opposite of what it is supposed to be: the intellect controlling the appetitive self. If, however, the soul gives up its opposition and becomes submissive and obedient to the demands of the fleshly appetites and the invitations of Satan, it is called ‘the self that commands evil’ (al-nafs al-ammāra bi-l-sūʾ). God, the Exalted, said, relating the words of Joseph or the wife of Potiphar ‘And I do not acquit myself, for verily the soul commands to evil’ (Q 12:53).40 The moral qualities of a person at this level are characterised by an oscillation between two extremes: cowardly or destructive, stingy or extravagant. He usually misses the golden mean and moderation in his actions. He follows his desires and employs his reason to serve his desires.41 At this level, the heart is considered to be ill, because the self is suffering from maladies of the heart, such as showing-off, revenge, arrogance, avarice, cowardliness, and the like. The maladies in the heart are reflected in the maladies in feelings, attitudes and actions. At this level of the self, reason exists in the service of passions. Ironically it is popularly considered that the more reason serves the passions the more ‘rational’ a person becomes. Yet paradoxically this type of ‘rational actor’ is seen as spiritually ill by the sufis, because his heart and mind are not free from the rule of the passions. 39  For more on the concept of al-nafs and various examples from early sufi literature, see Sara Sviri, “The Self and Its Transformation in Ṣūfīsm. With Special Reference to Early Literature”, Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 195–215. 40 Al-Ghazali, The Marvels of the Heart, p. 9. 41 Modern social sciences usually see the level of the appetitive self as human nature. This may be because of the way the statistical majority behaves in society. There are also deeper philosophical reasons why a person at the level of the appetitive self is seen as representing human nature. The empiricist philosopher David Hume (d. 1776) claimed, which is the opposite of what Ghazālī defends, that reason is, and ought to be, in the service of desires.

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Al-nafs al-lawwāma or ‘the self-critical self ’ denotes a transitory state from complete obedience to desires to freedom from them and a complete control by reason. This is a stage entailing great struggle to gain freedom from the rule of passions represented by the appetitive self. But when the soul is not completely at rest, it is striving to drive off and oppose the appetitive soul, and is called ‘the self-critical self ’ (al-nafs al-lawwāma); for it upbraids its possessor whenever he falls short in the worship of his Master. God the Exalted says, ‘Nay, and I swear by the upbraiding soul’ (Q 75:2).42 At the level of the critical self, one’s actions are no longer consistently in accordance with the demands of the appetitive self. This is because one develops an awareness about the negative results of completely following the appetitive self. At this level, one blames and criticises oneself for completely surrendering to one’s desires, and seeks liberation from that state. However it requires a challenging inner struggle to leave this state behind, and this is called the greatest war (al-jihād al-akbar), or migration (al-hijra) or journey in the homeland (safar dar waṭan). At this level one’s actions are not coherent and are even self-contradictory, because neither the intellect nor the appetitive self has complete control over one’s intentions and actions as the struggle between the two goes on. The illness in the heart has yet to be completely recovered but the healing process has commenced. Finally, al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna, refers to ‘the content self ’. If the conflict between the intellect and the appetitive self culminates in the victory of the former over the latter, one’s intentions and actions come into accord with the dictates of reason. The intellect becomes the sole ruler of the self. This is a great inner revolution, from the rule of passion to the rule of reason under divine guidance. When it is at rest under God’s command, and agitation has left it on account of its opposition to the fleshly appetites, it is called ‘the soul at rest’ (alnafs al-muṭmaʾinna). Of such a soul, scripture says, ‘Oh, you [the] soul at peace, return to your Lord, pleased, and pleasing Him’ (Q 89:27–8).43 This great and deep transformation is reflected in one’s actions and attributes, which fall into the category of the golden mean or moderation between two extremes. It no longer is at one of two extremes (for instance, generosity is the golden mean between avarice and extravagance). At this level one’s attributes and actions are characterised by coherence, consistent moderation and stability. At this level the self is cured of all the maladies of the heart, and this is reflected outwardly and becomes observable as good intentions, attributes and actions. Satan no longer has power over that person. The moderate demands of the appetitive self are approved by the heart and met by corrective actions. Excessive and extravagant demands are vetoed by the intellect under divine guidance. The voices and ideas coming from the mind are also critically evaluated by the intellect before they 42 Al-Ghazali,

 Ibid., p. 9.

43

The Marvels of the Heart, p. 9.

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are put into practice. In this state of affairs, the angel, the intellect and the heart are allied to establish complete control over the kingdom of the heart and body. The appetitive self, desires and passions are not killed or eliminated, rather they are put under the judicious control of reason. Reason rules over the heart. The emphasis on reason may be called the ‘rationalism’ of the sufi way. This type of reason bases its judgements on the ultimate outcome of actions, while the appetitive self bases its judgements on the immediate outcomes and pleasures of actions. Thus the person with the contented self is a rational actor, but his rationality is multiplex and includes both this world and the next world.

Conclusion One can conclude from the foregoing account, which has been drawn mostly from Ghazālī, that human action is a joint production of soul, mind and body. The soul is the locus of meaning, intention and will. If a physical action is willed, for instance, then the will is communicated to the brain, which moves the body to produce a particular action. From this perspective, the ultimate control centre of a human being is the soul, which is also called the heart, the intellect (or reason) and the self. The soul is hidden in itself and thus it lies beyond empirical study, but it is manifested through its actions in the body which is subject to empirical research and observation. Yet the soul is not stable, with its changing states known as the levels of the self. The self, from this perspective, denotes different states of the heart or the soul. The self is the cause and source of actions: it is the real effective agency. The self is not stagnant or fixed, instead it is fluid and open to change and evolution. The self changes depending on the configuration or the state of the heart which comprises an outcome of the ceaseless conflicts which obtain between reason and desires. Order in the heart is the cause of order in one’s actions, while malady in the heart is the cause of disorder in actions. Consequently, reforming actions requires reforming the heart, so that the therapy must focus on the heart. A healthy heart is the one ruled by the intellect under divine guidance, which manifests itself in one’s inner life as contentment and peace, and in observable actions as coherence, moderation and stability. Multiplex human ontology thus potentially offers an alternative model to explain human action based on the following premises: (1) Human ontology is multiplex: body, mind and soul. (2) The self is multiplex: ruling, critical and content. (3) The different states of the heart cause different intentions which in turn cause different actions. Therefore we may conclude that the states of the heart are the root causes, while the intentions are the causes of actions. Observable human action is only the tip of an iceberg and its causal chain needs to be traced back to the heart from which it originates.

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Bibliography Armstrong, David M. The Mind-Body Problem. An Opinionated Introduction, Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1999. Black, Deborah L., “Psychology. Soul and Intellect”, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 308–26. Er, Muhammed Emin, al-Mukhtārāt min Maktūbāt al-Imām al-Rabbānī al-Sirhindī, Istanbul: ISAR, 2016. Erzurumlu, İbrahim Hakkı, Mârifetnâme, Istanbul: Erkam Yayınları, 2011, 3 vols. Fakhry, Majid, A History of Islamic Philosophy, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2004. Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2015. Ghazali, al-, The Marvels of the Heart, trans. Walter James Skellie, Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2010. Griffel, Frank, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. Inati, Shams, Ibn Sina and Mysticism. Remarks and Admonitions. Part Four, London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. Kara, Mustafa, “Books About Sufi Terminology”, Sufism and Sufis in Ottoman Society. Sources, Doctrines, Rituals, Turuq, Architecture, Literature, Iconography, Modernism, ed. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2005, pp. 51–64. Katip Çelebi, Hacı Halife Mustafa b. Abdullah, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī l-kutub wa-lfunūn, ed. M. Şerefettin Yaltkaya, Ankara: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1941. McGinn, Colin, “Can we Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”, Mind, 98/391 (1989), pp. 349– 66. Ormsby, Eric, Ghazali, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. Qāshānī, Kamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-, Iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya, ed. Muḥammad Kamāl Ibrāhīm Jaʿfar, Cairo: Al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Kitāb, 1981. Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Sviri, Sara, “The Niche of Light”, The Taste of Hidden Things. Images on the Sufi Path, Iverness CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1997, pp. 1–22. Sviri, Sara, “The Self and its Transformation in Ṣūfīsm. With Special Reference to Early Literature”, Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 195–215. Tahānawī, Muḥammad ʿAlī al-, Mawsūʿa kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn wa-l-ʿulūm, ed. Rafīq al-ʿAjm et al., Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1996. Taşköprüzâde, Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafā, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda fī mawdūʿāt al-ʿulūm, Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2010. Türker, Ömer and İbrahim Halil Üçer (eds.), İnsan Nedir? İslam Düşüncesinde İnsan Tasavvurları, Istanbul: İLEM Yayınları, 2019. Wagman, Morton, Cognitive Science and the Mind-Body Problem. From Philosophy to Psychology to Artificial Intelligence to Imaging of the Brain, Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998.

Part II: Death and Human Becoming

Created to Be and to Become Human A Christian Perspective1 Ivana Noble ‘They are not like us – they are not fully human’. Such an attitude underpinned justifications of human exploitation by colonisers in the New World who claimed that ‘Indians’ did not have a soul, and therefore treating them with brutality was possible and even killing them could not be seen as murder. A similar position kept re-emerging in modern history; we find it in the Nazi approach to Jews and the disabled, the Communist approach to the enemies of their system, and so on. When George Bush in his early speeches defended war in Iraq, he spoke of the lives of an American soldier and of Iraqi people as having different value. Closer to home for me, when the Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian governments rejected Syrian refugees, there was a similar underpinning ‘logic’. Such ‘logic’ resembles what in ecclesiology is presented by a theory of concentric circles, where a privileged position – closest to the truth and grace – is claimed by those who interpret their relation to various others as inhabiting differently close/distant other circles.2 In such anthropological statements it is even more problematic. It projects various versions of the ‘we’, whether national, tribal, cultural, gender, class, or religious, to be in the centre, and to assume that the further others are from the centre, the less we can ascribe full humanity to them, the less value we ascribe to their lives, and thus the less their human needs have a claim upon us. Holders of such positions, quite scandalously, sometimes even appeal to Christian values. In this paper I show why Christian theology excludes such a possibility. Instead, understanding human identity as relational, including 1  This study is part of the work supported by Charles University Research Centre No. 204052: “Theological Anthropology in Ecumenical Perspective”. 2  We find this position, for example, in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam suam (ES 62 or 96) or in the Vatican II constitution Lumen gentium (LG 16), and even in the General Intercessions of the Good Friday liturgy. In all these cases we need to appreciate also its positive role, namely its attempt to include rather than exclude other Christians, Jews, Muslims, practitioners of other religions and all people of good will. And it is perhaps the first necessary step of how to make sense of the value of the other in relation to where ‘we’ stand. Other steps, however, need to follow, in which the assumption of the deficiency in others – on the grounds that they are not like us – would no longer be present.

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a creative tension between being and becoming human does not open doors to a higher and lower conception of humanity but introduces the need for growth. ‘One who is made in the image of God has the task of becoming who he is’,3 says Gregory of Nyssa. Now we will follow the consequences of his statement for a Christian theological anthropology.

What Constitutes Human Identity and How If we want to see what early Christian theologians saw as foundational for human identity, we need to go to their interpretations of the two creation narratives in the book of Genesis, where they found both the understanding of human beings as created in the ‘image’ after the ‘likeness of God’ (Genesis 1:26), and as joined with the rest of the created universe as ‘living beings’ (Genesis 2:7). Human identity is both given and yet to be gained, in that it is joined to communion with God and communion within creation. The Septuagint, which for the majority of the Church Fathers was the Christian Old Testament,4 translated the Hebrew beˈtselem (in the image of, as a replica, as a shadow of the original), as kat’ eikona (according to the image, as icon).5 Icon is a particular referential type of image, not an end in itself, but an opening to ‘the eternal present’, holding together what one receives from God and what one brings to the world, in love and freedom, through goodness and beauty.6 In this sense people are created to be ‘liminal windows between heaven and earth’7, through which God may be seen. But at the same time, the surrounding biblical narratives show us that this is something into which people 3 Gregory

of Nyssa, On the Creation of Man 16.  There is an ongoing dispute as to why in the majority of cases the Church Fathers considered the Septuagint as the Christian Old Testament. But as they often referred to the Greek version of the text, I include here both the Hebrew and the Greek variants. For more detail, see Andrew Louth, “Introduction to Genesis 1–11”, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament I. Genesis 1–11, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001, pp. xxxxix–lii, here pp. xl–xlvi; see also Møgens Müller, The First Bible of the Church. A Plea for the Septuagint, JSOT Supplement 206, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. 5  English translations of this passage differ. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV ), which I use in this essay, follows the Hebrew ‘in our image, according to our likeness’; the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS] sticks to: ‘according to our image and according to likeness’, while the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB] says: ‘in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves’. As even in the Hebrew text ‘in’ and ‘according to’ seem interchangeable (compare Genesis 1:26, 27 to Genesis 5:1, 3), I do not place any strong emphasis on this difference, but merely try to be as consistent as possible. 6  See Paul Evdokimov, Ages of the Spiritual Life, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002, pp. 238, 247–8. 7  This is how Richard Schneider speaks about icons; see “Orthodox Iconology (1). Iconography within the Context of Worship”, short version of manuscript of lecture course given at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood NY, 2010. 4

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grow their whole life. The Church Fathers usually spoke of the image as the stable given and the likeness as the dynamic potential that needs to be developed, so that we would become who we are, as Gregory of Nyssa puts it. The likeness, in Hebrew demuth, in Greek homoiōsin, suggests a process rather than a state.8 Both the image and the likeness, the state of being human and the process of becoming human are passed on from generation to generation.9 All subsequent generations have the same starting point: they are the image of God with the task to become like God: good, loving, caring. At the same time, the following generations carry the state of the world and of humankind they inherited from their ancestors. They will become also like them – blessed and harmed by their ancestral heritage.

The Image of God in the Face of the Other The image distinguishes human beings from the rest of the created universe and defines the manner in which people are to relate to God, to each other, to nature, and to the spiritual world. Being created in the image of God gives radical dignity and equality to all people. It grounds human rights, as much as human duties.10 But it needs to be respected even when the duties are not fulfiled. The humanity of everyone needs to be sought for and recognised and even, according to Potamius of Lisbon, admired in the other Look! He has demonstrated what we believe. God has engraved his image on the face of the human being and has said ‘in our image’. The knowledge of Father and Son is impressed upon the human face; and the very features of the face by means of the clay by which we are formed, revealed in the human original model how the Father and the Son were, so that one human being could admire God in another human being.11

Like the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas sixteen centuries later, this fourth-century Christian theologian speaks about the human face, and in  8  Andrew Louth emphasises that ‘the state of likeness would be homoiōma or homoiotēs’, that homoiōsis ‘was the word used by Plato to denote “likening to God” or “assimilation to God” (homoiōsis theō), which was for him the goal of philosophy, as he remarks in a phrase much quoted by the Fathers (Theatetus, 176b)’. Louth, “Introduction to Genesis 1–11”, p. l.  9 When the generations between Adam and Noah are enumerated, we read that humankind is created ‘in the likeness of God’ (Genesis 5:1). Adam ‘became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth’ (Genesis 5:3). 10 In other texts in the Pentateuch the stability of the image is used as the guarantee of the value of human life. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind’ (Genesis 9:6), we read after the flood narrative, when a new life is established through the descendants of Noah. 11  Potamius of Lisbon, Letter on the Substance, pp. 356–64. The translation is mostly taken from Andrew Louth, but it is changed into inclusive language. See Louth, Genesis 1–11, p. 33. For more detail on Potamius, see Marco Conti, The Life and Works of Potamius of Lisbon, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1998.

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particular the face of the other, as that which reveals human identity.12 For Potamius, the face of the other is interpreted Christologically. Human identity, that which is to be admired in the face of the other, is an image of the divine relationship  – of the Son revealing the Father. What Levinas and Potamius, however, have in common is that the revelation of the human identity has nothing to do with whether the face of the other is nice or ugly, dull, or, still harder, looks at us with animosity. Seeing the other as the image of God is not an emotional reaction to the other, nor a rational agreement with how the other conducts his or her life: it is a requirement of fundamental openness without which our own humanity is at stake. Not that we would lose the image, since it cannot be lost, but the image would never be vivified. We would never become like God. This is what Gregory of Nyssa has in mind when he says that we have the task of becoming who we are.13 Orthodox theology speaks about this process is terms of deification.14

Participation in God: The Gift and the Process Deification is not, however, a doctrine without problems. As it explores those aspects of our becoming who we are that join us to God, it has been vulnerable to transgressing the line and seeing people as divine because of their status, while it was argued that God was the ultimate source of the power structure giving them the status. But the doctrine is not reducible only to its problems. We need to recognise that the concept of deification itself does not emerge in the Bible. And there are good reasons for it. Both Jews and Christians opposed ideas and practices of deifying animals and heavenly bodies, worshipping heroes and dead relatives, and most of all, the divinisation15 of the rulers. This included not only the refusal to pay Caesar the divine tributes, which was one of the rea12 See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 199. 13  Gregory of Nyssa, On the Creation of Man 16. 14  The concepts of theopoiesis or theosis signify in Christian theology radical unity with God, while the difference between God and creatures is not abolished. Rather, such unity, such participation in God, is brought about both by grace and by human cooperation with grace. On the way towards God, people (and with them the created world) are brought into communion with God and in God, but also with all that is of God, with other creatures. In Orthodox theology the teaching on deification was developed by Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, John Damascene, and from there it passed into the Byzantine tradition. See Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. In Paul’s Christology the grounds for the notion of theosis are connected to that of self-emptying, kenosis, as used in Phil 2:7. See Mireia Ryšková, Pavel z Tarsu a jeho svět, Prague: Karolinum, 2014, p. 387. 15  Finlan and Kharlamov point out that in English there is a clear distinction between divinisation (taking on divine qualities) and deification (becoming a god-like being). See Stephen

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sons for their persecution but it was also because they recognised the tempting potential for any human power to assume divine status, something that would be dangerous not only outside Judaism and Christianity but also within them. All these political and religious practices were seen as idolatrous.16 Hence the biblical authors refused to use the same concept for explaining the final telos of human life and of the whole of creation in God. The concept of deification came to Christian theology via Hellenic Judaism, and was then used for interpreting our participation in God through Christ.17 ‘He became human so that we could become deified’ echoes almost like a refrain through the works of the second and the third-century theology.18 The glory for which we were created, is not only visible in God-man Jesus Christ, but is made accessible through him, as he has renewed our humanity. Thus, the doctrine of deification took the Church Fathers as if ‘before’ and ‘after’ the fall, but of course, not in terms of the measurable time. The doctrine of deification also helped in holding together the gift of being human and the process of becoming human as expressed in creation of people to the image and after the likeness of God.19

Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, Theōsis. Deification in Christian Theology, Eugene OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006, p. 7. 16  See Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, pp. 50, 333–44; Finlan and Kharlamov, Theōsis, pp. 6–7. 17  The terminology of deification was first adopted in Hellenic Judaism. There it was mediated neither through the cult of the powerful nor through the mystery cults, but through the philosophical notions of ‘participation’ in the divine life, and ‘reaching out to God in ecstasy’, through the metaphor of ‘the soul’s ascent’. Thus, philosophical mysticism was connected to the biblical images of the prophetic visions of the glory of God, ascension of the righteous and their share in the divine life itself (Enoch, Elijah, the death of Moses); the eschatological vision of the transformed cosmos. The Church Fathers, equipped with this legacy, used the concept of divinisation in the context of the salvific ‘reconfiguration’ of who we are and are to become in Christ. See Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, pp. 52, 77, 82–5; Nicholas Bamford, Deified Person. A Study of Deification in Relation to Person and Christian Becoming, Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2012, p. 107. 18  See, for example, Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5. Praef. For Athanasius, ‘He [the Word of God] became human that we might become God; and he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father; and he endured insults from humans that we might inherit incorruption’. See Athanasius, On Incarnation 54; Andrew Louth emphasises that thus the whole divine economy reaching from creation to deification, deification as a fulfilment of creation, not just as a reparation of the fall, secures a cosmic dimension of theology. Created order is thus ‘more than a background for the great drama of redemption’. At the same time, it is assumed that it is possible to approach the loving and active God through the ‘gates of repentance’. See Andrew Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology”, Partakers of the Divine Nature. The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008, pp. 32–44, here pp. 34–5. 19 See Genesis 1:26.

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The Living Beings The second, older and longer story, in Genesis 2–3, speaks about people being created ‘from the dust of the ground’ with ‘the breath of life’, and thus becoming ‘living beings’ (Genesis 2:7). Human identity is here also relational. It balances what could be seen as opposing poles: dust and spirit, men and women, placed between two trees in the paradise, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. While the narrative of the divine image and likeness expressed the heavenly dimension of being human, this story emphasises the earthly dimension, the dust of the earth,20 and contrasts it with the heavenly dimension, the breath of life. This symbolism has led a number of Church Fathers to assume that the material and the immaterial are opposing principles in human identity, as we find in Platonism.21 The dualist streams within Christian theological anthropology were often vulnerable to assuming not only a ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ within human powers, but also within humankind itself. Gender, class, and race provided various measuring rods for a ‘higher’ and a ‘lower’ humanity, disturbing the balance and creating injustice within church and society. The body, the woman, the slave, the stranger participated in God only indirectly in such a vision. However problematic dualism has been within Christian theology, its healing did not come from its opposite, monism, but rather from moving back to the appreciation of the different poles within creation and within humanity. It even has to be admitted that moderate forms of dualism did not have only negative effects. The spiritual interpretation was an alternative to literalist interpretations of the Scriptures; in the spiritual realm in the end gender, class or race hierarchies played a much less significant role. Furthermore, we find in Christian theological anthropology from very early on antidotes to dualism. The anti-Gnostic Fathers, such as Irenae20  The ‘materiality’ of being human is found also in other creation images: potter’s clay (Is 29:16; 45:9; 64:8; Jer 18:6; Rom 9:21) or weaver’s cloth (Ps 139: 13; Isa 38:12). 21  See Terry L. Givens, When the Soul Had Wings. Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Oxford Scholarship Online: DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313901.001.0001. (accessed February 2010). Theologians of the Alexandrian School, who inherited a tradition of conversation between Hellenic philosophy, Judaism, and later Christianity, considered the image of God to be found in the spiritual realm. Clement of Alexandria assumed that the human mind was created in the image of God. He saw the human mind as ‘the true human being’, created in the image of the divine Word, ‘the light that is the archetype of light […] a genuine son of Mind’. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks 10; as the Greek text uses the gender-neutral term anthropos, I translate it as human being. Origen put it even more strongly: ‘We do not understand, however, this human being, indeed whom Scripture says was made “according to the image of God” to be corporeal. For the form of the body does not contain the image of God […] But it is our inner man, invisible, incorporeal, incorruptible and immortal, that is made “according to the image of God”.’ Origen, Homilies on Genesis I.13. Similar explanations could be found in John Cassian and the ascetic tradition, but also in Ambrose, and in Augustine, who most extensively influenced later Western Christian tradition.

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us of Lyon, claimed that partaking in God was not a spiritualised dream, and that people were linked to God through their body,22 while the human soul was seen as the ‘breath of life’ making the flesh alive.23 Thus the spiritual and the material were not assumed as opposing principles but rather as two complementary dimensions of human life, both brought into life by God, both intrinsically linked to God. From here we can again restore the complementarity within humankind.

Grace and Freedom: The Stability of the Gift and the Openness of the Task The interpretations of the two creation narratives form one whole. The image and likeness as the foundations of every human life speak about being human as something given and something to be gained, or even something that can be broken or remain unfulfiled. In Christian theological anthropology even those who have received the salvation of Christ live in the tension between the stability of the gift and the openness of the task. In this sense, they are no different from the rest of humankind. As the twentieth-century Romanian Orthodox theologian Fr Dumitru Stăniloae puts it, we share with everyone else the responsibility to the Creator, a responsibility in terms of a requirement of response to God’s gifts by returning the gift to God with our ‘own valuable stamp on the gifts received and thereby […] [making] of them human gifts as well’.24 Freedom is dialogical. There is the freedom of God and the freedom of people. Both are irreducible. God created the world freely, out of love and goodness, not out of necessity. Freedom entered into the very dialogical nature of creation.25 Without freedom the exchange of gifts out of love is not possible. Without freedom as a gift and as a response, people cannot in any meaningful way participate in the divine glory for which they are destined.26 Christian theology speaks about the gift and the task of being human also in terms of grace and freedom. Grace precedes and 22  Donovan points out that this motif recurs throughout Against Heresies. Irenaeus responds in this way to the Valentinian gnostic postulate of multiple figures involved with the creation, while the one Supreme God remains totally out of any direct contact with it. See esp. Against Heresies 1.22.1; 2.25.2–3; 3.6.1–4; 4.26.2; in Mary Ann Donovan, “Alive to the Glory of God. A Key Insight in St Irenaeus”, Theological Studies, 49 (1988), pp. 283–97, at p. 286, n. 11. 23  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.7.1. 24 Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God. The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology II. The World. Creation and Deification, Brookline MA: Holy Cross, 2005, p. 25. 25 See Stăniloae, The World, pp. 18, 87, 89. I have dealt with this theme in more detail in Ivana Noble, “Doctrine of Creation within the Theological Project of Dumitru Stăniloae”, Communio Viatorum, 49/2 (2007), pp. 185–209. 26  See Stăniloae, The World, p. 37. Nikolai Berdyaev linked the process of becoming to freedom: ‘Freedom is the ultimate: it cannot be derived from anything: it cannot be made the equivalent of anything. Freedom is the baseless foundation of being: it is deeper than all being’. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, London: V. Gollanz, 1955, p. 145.

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accompanies every act of God towards us. We could say that it is another name for God’s love towards us, love out of which and for which we are created, each of us, and all of us, without exception. Being created as beings with a free will is part of that gift. Or we could say, it places the task within the gift. Mediating between freedom and love, to use St Maximus’s language,27 people grow towards what they are. However, do they always grow towards what they are? Freedom also represents a radical threat to love, both to divine love and to human and creaturely love. People are free to turn their back on love, to pursue its opposite. They are free to disagree with the aim for which they were created, communion with God and in God with all that is of God. What then is the role of grace?

The Fall and the Renewal The two trees in the Adam and Eve creation narrative represent different characteristics of God. God is the giver of life and only God can manage the knowledge of good and evil without being corrupted by it. When people want to assume equality with God without God, they fall. The relationships which are their respective identities, get corrupted.28 Turning ourselves into an idol and building up an ideology of humanity on that idol had, in human history, both materialist or secular expressions as well as religious and spiritual ones, as we have seen, for example, in the language about divinisation. In the second creation narrative in Genesis the process of becoming includes the Fall and the need of renewal which would be initiated by God and responded to by people. St Irenaeus interprets this creation story as follows: people were created as free but also as immature, like children.29 Their freedom was given together with God’s advice concerning what is and what is not good for them. This first elementary discernment between good and evil is initially expressed as a difference between choosing to be obedient or disobedient.30 And the symbolic first people failed to choose obedience. The story tells us that, when it came to obedience or disobedience, they were too tempted by the promising fruits of knowing good and evil as God does. And each of these decisions is to mark a different way of becoming. In this light, the emphasis is not on the pre-lapsarian stage of the archetypal people as the lost glorious past.31 The central place is occupied by the divine pedagogy leading from the imperfect conditions of Adam and Eve to the perfect  See St Maximus, Ambigua 41.  As St John of Damascus says, through losing the likeness to God, we people have ‘falsified the image’. See John of Damascus, Homily on the Withered Fig Tree 1. 29  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.22.4; 4.38.1. 30  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.37.1. 31 See John Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 49–50. 27 28

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ones of Mary and Christ, in whom we are called.32 Even the role of death is pedagogical. Unlike most other Church Fathers, Irenaeus assumes that the archetypal people were not immortal before their lapse, and after the lapse death proves to be the gift of God’s mercy.33 Being free, immature and immortal would mean that if people opted for evil, they would be forever lost, and the evil in them would be ‘interminable and irremediable’.34 One type of becoming which we can follow in Genesis 3–7 leads to destruction. The story about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is followed by Cain’s murder of Abel, and in the time of Noah by such widespread corruption among humans that God regrets ever creating them.35 The other type of becoming is a way of repentance. This act is not found with Cain,36 who after murdering his brother responds to God’s asking where Abel is by saying: ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gn 4:9) It is not found among the contemporaries of Noah, of whom the Bible says that ‘every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually’ (Gn 6:5). In contrast, Irenaeus traces the way of penance to Adam and Eve. After the fruit of knowledge is eaten, and God in the garden calls, and his creature, Adam is ‘at a state of confusion at having transgressed His command, he feels unworthy to appear before and to hold converse with God’.37 He is afraid because he is naked, Irenaeus says that he has lost ‘the robe of sanctity’, which he ‘had from the Spirit’ and took on the covering of penance, the clothing of leaves ‘which gnaws and frets the body’.38 The blame game which goes on afterwards could be interpreted at least in two different ways. One is that the communion 32  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.22.3–4; compare to Mt 19:30; 20:16. This eschatological beginning is narrated in John’s Prologue (J 1: 1–5, 12–13), but it has some parallels also in the book of Wisdom, where becoming the image of God is linked to incorruptibility. The book of Wisdom says that God created us ‘for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity’ (Wisdom 2:23). This eschatological fullness towards which our becoming is oriented is found also in Psalm 82: ‘I say, You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you’ (Ps 82:6). But there, the previous and the following verses show also the contrast to the result of the other way of becoming, becoming alienated from God: ‘They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. […] [therefore people, who were elevated as gods] shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince’ (Ps 82:5, 7). 33 ‘For it was necessary that nature should be exhibited first, and afterwards that the mortal part should be subdued and absorbed by the immortal, and, finally, that man should be made after the image and likeness of God, having received the knowledge of good and evil.’ Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.4. Behr shows that while the ‘pedagogical aspect’ of death is unique to Irenaeus, the positive evaluation of death after the fall can be found also in other patristic writers. Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement, p. 52. 34  Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.23.6. 35 See Genesis 6:5–6. 36  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.23.4. 37  Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.23.5. 38  Ibid. For the interpretation of this passage, see John Behr, “Irenaeus AH 3.23.5, and the Ascetic Ideal”, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 37/4 (1993), pp. 305–13.

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between the two people is broken, and the other, which Irenaeus prefers, is that they try to narrate as exactly as they can what has happened, each surprised at their inability to resist where the temptation entered in through the agency of another, and in the first instance, through the snake, ‘the prime mover in the guilty deed’.39 Irenaeus’s point is again to uncover the divine counter-acting economy. The expulsion out of Paradise would make another growth possible. The gift of mortality will ultimately disjoin people from their sin. Dying to sin, they might begin to live for God, and when the oldest enemy of humankind, ‘the old serpent’ will be conquered in Christ, through whom also Adam and Eve will receive new life, death also will be able to be destroyed. It will no longer be needed. Salvation, as a new creation, is not only a repetition of the old act; it moves humankind to a qualitatively new plane. People are vivified by means of communion with Christ; the Holy Spirit opens the ascent on the ladder of incorruption towards God.40 The perfect gift of life which people were unable to receive at the beginning can be received when we recognise that we have fallen away from God. And the attitude of penance is the right disposition for such a reception. This is the didactic answer of Irenaeus. Freedom in this light in no way disappears but matures. ‘Reckoning on becoming his own lord’, Adam ‘became his own slave’, says Stăniloae. According to him, the first people in the creation story did not know yet that the ‘human person is free only if he is free also from himself for the sake of others in love, and if he is free for God who is the source of freedom because he is the source of love’.41 Eschatologically speaking, the creation of people to God’s image, according to his likeness, is joined in Christian theological anthropology to Christ’s salvation which brings to death all that is deadly in us and renews the broken relationship with God, and the broken mediations between the different poles within us, within humanity, within creation.42 The mythological-historical and the eschatological narrations of the growth into who we are as human beings are joined in one movement of becoming: a movement oriented by its giver and by his promise of fulfilment.43

39 Irenaeus,

Against Heresies 3.23.5.  See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.23.5–8; 24.1. 41 Stăniloae, The World, p. 179. 42  For the five mediations Christ accomplishes, see St Maximus, Ambigua 41. 43 As Origen puts it, for them, the arché and the telos inform each other: ‘The end is always like the beginning; as there is one end of all things, so we must understand that there is one beginning of all things, as there is one end of many things, so from one beginning arise many differences and varieties, which in their turn are restored, through God’s goodness, through their subjection to Christ and their unity with the Holy Spirit, to one end which is like the beginning’. Origen, On First Principles, 1.6.2. See also Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings. Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008, p. 108. 40

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Conclusion In this essay I have sought to show why in Christian theology the likeness and the image cannot be confused. The image grounds the value of every human life, and with regard to that image, there is a complete equality: we all have the same position in front of God, there are no privileges. Every attempt to count whether a life of a member of one nation or tribe, gender or age is more or less valuable in comparison to others is out of place. And even in practical matters, for example, when doctors have to decide whom to give medication when there is not enough for all, or which life will be saved first when confronted by multiple casualties, such decisions have to be made on different grounds than that of a comparative calculating of values of different lives. Each human being is an image of God, an educated European, a poor Arab, a healthy youth, a disabled child, a dying homeless old person. The dynamic element represented by the likeness of God does not bring any change into this radical equality. On the contrary, it makes the radical equality more visible. While the holy narratives follow patterns present in all people, the process of becoming is specific for each one, reflecting his or her conditions, gifts, or their absence, his or her vocation. We could say that also the ways in which we fall and in which we rise are specific to each person. It is so specific that one cannot judge what it means for another. In this sense, it is completely different from recognising and admiring the image of God in the other. Here recognising means giving space to uniqueness, to otherness, recognising the limits of what I can know and respecting the mystery of the other. This is still something quite different from saying that we are unable to discern between what is good and what is evil outside our inner life. This does happen and needs to happen. Without such discernment human relations cannot function; church, society, any religious or social institution, needs such discernment. The fact that the other remains always also a mystery, and that ultimate judgment belongs to God makes such discernment human in the best meaning of the word. This reading, elaborated here, has a likeness to God as a promise which shines in the graced moments of people’s lives. These moments appeal to us like memorials conveying understanding. Yet, being created to become the iconic image of God means, for Christians, that the memory of God in us is to become not only a matter of graced moments, but a permanent reality. It means that freedom and love in us will mature, that our understanding and creativity will come into focus, and grow towards the source and the aim of our life. It means, in short, that in all that we are, in all the relations in which we participate, we will be free and all will be grace.

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Bibliography Bamford, Nicholas, Deified Person. A Study of Deification in Relation to Person and Christian Becoming, Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2012. Behr, John, “Irenaeus AH 3.23.5, and the Ascetic Ideal”, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 37/4 (1993), pp. 305–13. Behr, John, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Berdyaev, Nikolai, The Meaning of the Creative Act, London: V. Gollanz, 1955. Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginnings. Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008. Conti, Marco, The Life and Works of Potamius of Lisbon, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1998. Donovan, Mary Ann, “Alive to the Glory of God. A Key Insight in St Irenaeus”, Theological Studies, 49 (1988), pp. 283–97. Evdokimov, Paul, Ages of the Spiritual Life, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. Finlan, Stephen and Vladimir Kharlamov, Theōsis. Deification in Christian Theology, Eugene OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006. Givens, Terry L., When the Soul Had Wings. Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Oxford Scholarship Online: DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313901.001.0001. (accessed February 2010). Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Louth, Andrew, “Introduction to Genesis 1–11”, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament I: Genesis 1–11, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001, pp. xxxxix–lii. Louth, Andrew, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology”, Partakers of the Divine Nature. The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008, pp. 32–44. Müller, Møgens, The First Bible of the Church. A Plea for the Septuagint, JSOT Supplement 206, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Noble, Ivana, “Doctrine of Creation within the Theological Project of Dumitru Stăniloae”, Communio Viatorum, 49/2 (2007), pp. 185–209. Russell, Norman, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ryšková, Mireia, Pavel z Tarsu a jeho svět, Prague: Karolinum, 2014. Schneider, Richard, “Orthodox Iconology (1). Iconography within the Context of Worship”, short version of manuscript of lecture course given at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood NY, 2010. Stăniloae, Dumitru, The Experience of God. The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology II. The World. Creation and Deification, Brookline MA: Holy Cross, 2005.

‘He Who has created death and life’ (Q 67:2) Death in Islamic Theology and Spirituality* Lejla Demiri Every time I visit my hometown in North Macedonia, I am consistently reminded of death by a müezzin, or caller to prayer, who several times a day announces the death of a local inhabitant from a mosque minaret. He begins with a short recitation from the Qur’an, followed by praises to the Living God, singing His name in one of the more sombre, minor modes, and then finishes with the mention of the name of the deceased and the details of the forthcoming funeral. Regarded as one of the community’s last duties towards a loved one, this centuries-old tradition of conveying sad news has the power to remind all the listeners of their inescapable mortality. It is a practice that speaks to Muslim ears as well as to those of their Christian neighbours and friends. The Muslim scripture is persistent in its emphasis on the fanāʾ or the temporality of the world and its dwellers. ‘Every soul will taste of death’ (Q 3:185; 21:35; 29:57); ‘Wheresoever you may be, death will overtake you, even if you were to be in lofty towers’ (Q 4:78) says the Qur’an, reminding the reader that ‘Everyone [on earth] shall perish, all that remains is the Countenance of your Lord of Might and Glory’ (Q 55:26–7). This reminder is not morbid, but has the objective of encouraging the human being to trust her/his Creator, for it is only He that has no beginning or end and is the refuge for His creation. He is described as the Wārith, or the Inheritor (Q 15:23), which in Abū Ḥāmid alGhazālī’s (d. 505/1111) theology indicates ‘the one who endures after the creation vanishes, and all things return to Him as their end result’.1 Some of the most familiar divine predicates announce that the sovereignty of the heaven and earth belongs to Him; He is the giver of life and death (Q 7:158; see also 57:2); and there is no protecting friend or helper other than * An earlier version of this paper appeared in a German translation: “Eine Theologie des Todes”, in Islamische Bildungsarbeit in der Schule. Theologische und didaktische Überlegungen zum Umgang mit ausgewählten Themen im islamischen Religionsunterricht, ed. Fahimah Ulfat and Ali Ghandour, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2020, pp. 249–64. 1  Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2004, p. 148.

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Him (Q 9:116). In the Qur’an’s naming of God, cosmology and eschatology are thus interconnected. One is often called to observe the divine power not in nature alone, but also in one’s very self, whose weakness and dependence on God is most tremendously experienced at the time of its death. Nevertheless, death is also presented as good news: a return to the Creator (Q 10:56; 21:35; 29:57; 45:26; 50:43). When afflicted with misfortune, the Qur’an instructs its audience to say: ‘We belong to God, and to Him we are returning’, following the manner of those who are steadfast (Q 2:156). In this scriptural vision of things, with its distinctive understanding of death as ‘return’, the righteous are thus instructed not to fear death. One infers this from the Qur’anic depiction of how, upon death, the God-fearing will be welcomed with the words: ‘O soul at peace (al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna): return to your Lord well-pleased (rāḍiya) and wellpleasing (marḍiyya)’ (Q 89:27–8). Complementing the Qur’an’s lamenting of human fallibility is a promise that it is through divine mercy that one can reach heavenly bliss. This is exactly described by Smith and Haddad in their book The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, ‘As God brings back all to Him in a circle of unity, so He guides and supports the upward movement of the human soul in the progression which leads to the nafs al-muṭmaʾinna in the peace of the Garden of Eternity’.2

Cyclical and Linear Conceptions of Time Conventionally, we view Abrahamic religion as a harbinger of linear time; Eliade and others have proposed the monotheisms and the wider axial cultures as enemies of ancient cyclical understandings of the universe and of human becoming.3 The Islamic form of religion seems to comply. Although the Qur’an does not begin with the creation of the world and progress to the end of days, it does insist on the world moving steadily within a sacred time that is in a single direction and seemingly without hope of reverse or reiteration. Yet in the image of life and death, as depicted by God’s Qur’anic names, resurrection is always linked to the first creation. It is God ‘Who produces, then reproduces’ (Q 85:13). The Qur’anic argument for the truthfulness of resurrection (maʿād) is straightforward: He Who is able to create out of nothing is far more capable of bringing them back to life after death. ‘It is He Who gives life and death, and when He ordains a thing, He says only “Be” and it is’ (Q 40:68).

2  Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 17. 3 See, for instance, Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History. The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1959.

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In the Qur’an, human creation and resurrection, while moments on a linear journey, are intimately linked to the divine agency demonstrated in the cosmic order, and this order is described in terms that seem to blur the distinction between the linear and the cyclical. The listeners are thus called to: ‘Travel throughout the earth and see how He brings life into being: and He will bring the next life (al-nashʾa al-ākhira or later growth) into being. God has power over all things’ (Q 29:20). It further instructs us to: ‘Look at the imprints of God’s mercy, how He restores the earth to life after death: this (same God) is the one who will return people to life after death – He has power over all things’ (Q 30:50). Natural phenomena are signs of His sovereignty. The Qur’an is persistent in emphasising that the constant and visible effects of the divine rule in the natural world demonstrate His power and capacity to bring humanity back to life after death (e. g. Q 11:7). The Qur’an often speaks of the earth being revived in seasonal cycles (Q 22:5–7): You sometimes see the earth lifeless, yet when We send down water it stirs and swells and produces every kind of joyous growth: this is because God is the Truth; He brings the dead back to life; He has power over everything. There is no doubt that the Last Hour is bound to come, nor that God will raise the dead from their graves.

The Scripture’s message is clear (Q 57:17): ‘Remember that God revives the earth after it dies; We have made Our revelation clear to you so that you may use your reason.’ Similarly, elsewhere it pronounces that (Q 16:65): ‘It is God who sends water down from the sky and with it revives the earth when it is dead. There truly is a sign in this for people who listen.’4 The sign is then further clarified in verse Q 35:9: ‘It is God who sends forth the winds; they raise up the clouds; We drive them to a dead land and with them revive the earth after its death: such will be the Resurrection.’ In addition to the topos of the revival of the dry earth with life-giving water, the alternation of night and day is also presented as the proof for His power to recreate (Q 23:80): ‘It is He Who gives life and death; the alternation of night and day depends on Him; will you not use your minds?’5 So life and death, experienced by human beings as events in linear time, are analogised to natural movements which are recurrent and cyclical. The Qur’an’s constant evocation of natural signs, once seen by the Arabs as animated and occult principles, ensures that one of its recurrent themes is cyclical movement. The rotation of seasons, 4 See also Q 29:63: ‘If you ask them, ‘Who sends water down from the sky and gives life with it to the earth after it has died?’ they are sure to say, ‘God.’ Say, ‘Praise belongs to God!’ Truly, most of them do not use their reason.’ As well as Q 30:24: ‘Among His signs, too, are that He shows you the lightning that terrifies and inspires hope; that He sends water down from the sky to restore the earth to life after death. There truly are signs in this for those who use their reason.’ 5  See also Q 45:5: ‘In the alternation of night and day, in the rain God provides, sending it down from the sky and reviving the dead earth with it, and in His shifting of the winds there are signs for those who use their reason.’

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the alternation of day and night, the regular motions of heavenly bodies, define the Qur’anic cosmology as well as eschatology: ‘He brings the living out of the dead and the dead out of the living. He gives life to the earth after death, and you will be brought out in the same way’ (Q 30:19). In this scriptural reality, time turns out to be linear, but we discern a strong recollection of ancient cyclical understandings as well. A similar pattern is to be observed in Qur’anic prophetology which is universal by its very nature. There is a continuum in the line of prophets; beginning with Adam and culminating in Muhammad, the teachings of all prophets and messengers of God originate from the same source of eternal wisdom. ‘The Islamic conception of time’, as pointed out by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘is based essentially on the cyclic rejuvenation of human history through the appearance of various prophets’.6 Just as natural phenomena are witness to such oscillations, the divine word revives itself in cyclical moments in the world history. What is the connection between the revival of the dead and their first creation? A theologian such as Ghazālī would insist that ‘the resurrection is another sort of creation (inshāʾ) quite unrelated to the first’, for in his opinion and in the opinion of many other medieval theologians, there are not only two creations, but many. The human being goes through different stages of creation as an embryo, a child, an adolescent and an adult. Each one of these is a stage, for to follow the Qur’anic description, God created human beings ‘by diverse stages’ (Q 71:14). Not only the human body and mind, but also the human spiritual fulfilment is completed in stages.7 Therefore, Ghazālī believes that ‘one ought not to make comparisons between the next creation and the first. These creations are stages of a single essence and the steps by which it ascends to the stages of perfection, until it edges closer to the presence which is the utmost of all perfection, and that is to be with God – great and glorious.’8 What Ghazālī’s statement underlines is that the creative power of God is continuous and infinitely present, and death is part of this process. It is the end of the familiar unidirectional human cycle, although it is the beginning of another life, albeit one which is in no sense portrayed as a repetition of this. It is precisely this conception of life and death that incites sufis to consider the cosmos as a key to understanding the hereafter. This can be clearly observed in the thought of Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141) a contemplative sufi from Andalusia, a contemporary of Ghazālī, who insists on the importance of persistent reflection on the first creation in order to understand the hereafter: Observing the first configuration (al-nashʾa al-ūlā) [of the world] gives knowledge of the configuration of the hereafter; and pondering the existence of this world gives knowledge 6  Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Traditional Islam in the Modern World, London: Kegan Paul International, 1987, p. 116. 7  Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, p. 121. 8  Ibid., p. 122.

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of the existence of the next; and observing the things of this world gives knowledge of things of the next; and pondering the rotation of night and day, and the succession of the ages, and the revolving of the spheres, gives conviction in the finiteness [of ] the world and recalls its smallness, through which one comes to know the grandeur, scope, and excellence of the hereafter.9

The unseen thus becomes manifest through pondering the visible world. Ibn Barrajān regards the reflecting on the signs of God as ‘the most excellent act of worship, because it draws one into [a state of ] remembrance within the remembrance (al-dhikr fī al-dhikr)’.10 He takes a step further as he states that ‘mystical knowledge (maʿrifa) only comes from lengthy meditation and repeated iʿtibār [contemplation] of God’s creation and artisanry’.11 For ‘God hides the next world in the shade of this world’, and ‘the hereafter surrounds this world. It is hidden within it, yet concealed from us’.12 So there is continuity between the two worlds or two types of existence that can be only detected by the methodical exercise of contemplation, which also constitutes the path to gaining knowledge of God, the sole Creator of death and life. This connectivity, which appears as a linear continuum between the visible and the unseen, is complemented with the cyclicity (dawāʾir) of time and determination, which defines the very operational principle of the cosmos, the world of creation, in Ibn Barrajān’s cosmology. He writes: All the channels of divine wisdom (majārī ḥikmat Allāh) in this world and the next flow in cycles of firmly fixed circularity, so that the end-points of the wisdom return to their starting-points, only for the starting-point to come back to their end-points. God firmly fixed His command in this manner throughout earth and heaven, channeling the spheres through their places of ascent and descent. He guided in this manner the sun, moon, stars, winds, night, and day, measuring in this manner their hours, minutes of the hours, and waymarks.13

He further notes that God set up this world to be an abode of transformation and fluctuation. Neither its wellbeing nor its affliction last. Rather, everything undergoes firmly fixed cycles and an interconnected governance in which one part follows the other.14

And given that God, in Ibn Barrajān’s theology, is the timeless centre of reality, all cycles of time end in God.15 This notion of the return to the source is in con 9  As quoted from his Tanbīh al-afhām in Yousef Casewit, The Mystics of al-Andalus. Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 115. 10 Ibid., p. 114. 11 Ibid., pp. 114–5. 12 Ibid., p. 276. 13  Ibid., p. 285. 14  Ibid., p. 286. 15  Ibid., p. 286.

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formity with the divine pronouncement: ‘Do not all things reach God at last?’ (Q 42:53). Taking into account these examples, one may conclude that ‘the distinction between the linear and cyclical time’, as Julian Baggini points out, ‘is not always neat’. Rather than either/or assumptions, the ‘reality is more complicated’,16 especially when it comes to the Islamic tradition and its consideration of zamān. This complex notion of time is a defining principle of human life on earth, moulding its future in the hereafter.

The Ontology of Death In Muslim literature on death and resurrection, death is often likened to sleep, which is described as the ‘small or lesser death’.17 This view seems to have been inspired by the Qur’anic verse 39:42 which tells us that ‘God takes the souls of the dead and the souls of the living while they sleep – He keeps hold of those whose death He has ordained and sends the others back until their appointed time – there truly are signs in this for those who reflect.’ The Qur’an thus underlines that the enigmatic nature of sleep is no less wondrous than that of death, but they both demonstrate one point, that the human soul is under divine control. Likewise, the cyclicity of sleep is analogous to the soul’s ultimate return to its Origin. A reverse comparison is also made, defining death as similar to, or even as a form of sleep. A number of theologians describe the dead in their graves with the metaphor of a sleeping bride. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) even suggests that there will be cushions in the grave on which the believer will ‘sleep the sleep of a bride-groom!’ He then adds that ‘the spirit is connected to its body in a way not like the connection of the earthly life, but resembling the condition of sleep.’18 Such metaphors seem to depict and foster a less fearsome image of death. In a qaṣīda attributed to Ghazālī, a widely-known poem that is traditionally believed to have been found in his deathbed (on 14 Jumādī l-ākhir 505/18 December 1111),19 the great imam urges his mourning friends to Consider not death to be death, for it is True life, the ultimate goal of all wishes. 16  Julian Baggini, “‘Day and Night Revolve as on a Wheel’. Time”, How the World Thinks. A Global History of Philosophy, London: Granta Books, 2018, pp. 107–15, at p. 109. 17 See Smith and Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, p. 49. 18 See Ibid., p. 49. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, Bushrā l-kaʾīb bi-liqāʾ al-ḥabīb, ed. Majdī al-Sayyid Ibrāhīm, Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur’ān, 1986, pp. 52 and 67. 19 See ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, al-Kawkab al-mutalālī sharḥ Qaṣidat al-Ghazzālī, ed. Lejla Demiri in “Death as an Existential Quality (Amr Wujūdī). ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Commentary on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī’s Poetry”, Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and his Network of Scholarship, ed. Lejla Demiri and Samuela Pagani, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019, pp. 363–422, § 26.

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The living one of this world is sunk in deep sleep, And when he dies, he flies away from slumber. Let the shock of death not frighten ye, it is naught, But a departure from there to here.

Given its powerful wording and optimistic view of death, Ghazālī’s poem has attracted the attention not only of a Muslim audience, but was also known and read within Jewish intellectual circles as early as the thirteenth century. This we know from an extant copy in Hebrew characters preserved in the Cairo Geniza20 as well as a sixteenth-century translation into Hebrew by the North African rabbinical authority Abraham Gavison (d. 1605).21 As seen in these lines, for Ghazālī, death is not a terminus, but a journey back to the Originator. He further describes the body as a temporary dwelling (bayt) and garment (qamīṣ) of the soul, considering death as an awakening from sleep. Ultimately it is death that enables the soul to reach God, the Merciful. Importantly, death does not mean non-existence for Ghazālī – a view shared by many other medieval theologians and Muslim philosophers. He believes that the human being is created for eternity and there is no way for him or her to become non-existent. Quoting the Prophetic saying: ‘Indeed, the grave is either one of the pits of the fires of hell or one of the gardens of paradise’,22 Ghazālī argues that the dead have a kind of emotional sense. Those who are blessed are regarded by the Qur’an not to be dead, but ‘living; with their Lord they have provision’ (Q 3:169). The dead who are wretched, says Ghazālī, are also alive. For this, Ghazālī’s proof comes from the hadith narrating the event when the Prophet addressed the dead polytheists and when asked how he addressed people who had already died, he responded: ‘You are no better than they at hearing what I say; it is just that they cannot answer’.23 These scriptural texts suggest for Ghazālī that death has its own category of existence, albeit one different from the worldly life we are familiar with. A similar line of thinking is to be found in Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) magnum opus al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (‘The Meccan Openings’), when he writes that death is not the elimination of life (izālat al-ḥayāt); it has its own existence, for the universe cannot be emptied of divine reality (ḥaqīqa 20  Hartwig Hirschfeld, “A Hebraeo-Suffic Poem”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 49 (1929), pp. 168–73. Hirschfeld’s article includes an edition of this Geniza text together with the poem in Arabic characters (based on MS London, British Library, Add. 7596, fol. 251) as well as an English translation. 21  Esperanza Alfonso, “A Poem Attributed to al-Ghazzālī in Hebrew Translation”, Mikan. Journal for Hebrew and Israeli Literature and Cultural Studies, 11 (2012) and El Prezente. Studies in Sephardic Culture, 6 (2012), joint volume, pp. 80–94, at p. 80. 22  Al-Tirmidhī, Sunan, “Ṣifat al-Qiyāma” 26 (ed. Ibrāhīm ʿAṭwa ʿIwaḍ, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1962, vol. 4, p. 640, no. 2460). 23  Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, pp. 120–1.

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ilāhiyya). If you believe that the dead are questioned (suʾāl) in their graves, then you cannot claim that they are ‘dead’ in a non-existent sense. If they were not ‘alive’, they would not have been interrogated. Hence Ibn ʿArabī emphatically concludes that death cannot be regarded as the opposite (ḍidd) of life.24 In Akbarian terms, death is a move (intiqāl) from this world to the other or from one modulation of being to another; it is a linear journey; but life does not cease with death, even though our timebound mental frame prevents us from correctly comprehending this. In Ibn ʿArabī’s words, death is the end of the apparent governance of the operator, i. e. the spirit (rūḥ) appointed by God to manage (the body) in this corporeal, visible world. The dead person knows that he is alive, writes Ibn ʿArabī. It is simply your misjudgement if you consider him otherwise. Comparing his post-death existence to his actions prior to death, you conclude that he is no longer alive; and yet in reality he was no more in charge of himself before his death than he is after his death. It is God who is in charge of every existing being. Your actions while you wash the dead body and put him in a shroud are totally administered by God and your role in performing your actions is no greater than that of a dead person. All are administered by the Creator, concludes Ibn ʿArabī.25 From this deterministic perspective the difference between worldly life and life in the grave seems significantly reduced. Following in the footsteps of Ibn ʿArabī, Shaykhīzāda (Şeyhzâde Muhyiddin Mehmed Kocevî, d. 950/1543), a sixteenth-century Naqshbandī scholar, one of the most widely-known and widely-read authors within Ottoman learned circles, characterises death as ‘an existential quality’ (amr wujūdī), for God is described in the Qur’an as the Creator of both ‘death and life’ (Q 67:2) – a view that he attributes to the ahl al-Sunna. Had death no existence, it would not have been possible to relate it to creation.26 In other words, how can the Qur’an describe God as the giver of death if death didn’t have its own reality? It is not a simple absence or privation; it is an entity in its own right. In the opening of Sūra alMulk, death is actually mentioned before life, a point that has not escaped the theologian’s attention, who regards this, again, as a divine emphasis on death and its status as a thing in itself. Commenting on Ghazālī’s depiction of death, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s (d. 1143/1731) focus is also on the ontology of death. Does death have its own existence? Or does it only mean the absence of life? Throughout the text, Nābulusī follows this characterisation of death as an existential quality. Nābulusī’s reading and interpretation of Ghazālī’s poem is very much shaped by Akbarian 24  Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ed. Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, (s.d.), vol. 8, p. 8; see also Nābulusī, Kawkab, § 36. 25  Ibn ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, vol. 8, p. 9; see also Nābulusī, Kawkab, § 37. 26  Muḥyī l-Dīn Shaykhzāda Muḥammad ibn Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Muṣṭafā, Ḥāshiya ʿalā Tafsīr al-Qāḍī al-Bayḍāwī, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir Shāhīn, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999, vol. 8, p. 267; see also Nābulusī, Kawkab, § 35.

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metaphysics, though not limited to it. Reflecting on Ghazālī’s verses in the same poem: The origin of our souls is one, And thus are the bodies of us all […] Show mercy to me, and ye shall receive mercy, Know that ye also follow in our footsteps,

Nābulusī refers to Ibn Jamīl al-Tūnisī’s (d. 715/1315)27 opinion that whoever truly acknowledges that all human beings come from one single soul can never be arrogant and haughty. Ibn Jamīl further considers this as a proof of resurrection, because He Who is capable of creating all of humanity from a single soul is even more capable of bringing them back to life.28 The thought of having a single origin and journeying back towards that origin should prevent one from selfglorification and looking down upon others. Thus sharing the same destiny within the cyclicity of human existence serves as a tool for instilling humility in one’s heart and teaching human equality.

Death as Catalyst for Spiritual Growth Muslim theologians and philosophers, as well as mystics, have composed many books and treatises on the question of death and its consequences. Some of the key works in this vast literature include Kindī’s (d. ca 260/873) al-Ḥīla li-dafʿ alaḥzān (‘On the Art of Averting Sorrows’),29 the last chapter of which deals with the human fear of death; Ghazālī’s al-Durra al-fākhira fī kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira (‘The Precious Pearl Unveiling the Knowledge of the Hereafter’)30 as well as his Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu (‘The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife’)31 which is the 40th book of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (‘The Revival of the Religious Sciences’); Qurṭubī’s (d. 671/1273) al-Tadhkira fī aḥwāl al-mawtā fī 27  Ibn Jamīl al-Tūnisī’s (d. 715/1315) commentary on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1209) Qur’an commentary, entitled al-Tanwīr mukhtaṣar al-Tafsīr al-kabīr (‘Enlightenment. An Abridgment of the Great Commentary’). For the existing manuscripts of this work, see alFihris al-shāmil li-l-turāth al-ʿarabī al-islāmī al-makhṭūṭ, Amman: Muʾassasat Āl al-Bayt, 1989, vol. 1, p. 359. 28  Nābulusī, Kawkab, § 78.2. 29  Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī, Risāla fī l-ḥīla li-dafʿ al-aḥzān, ed. and trans. Mustafa Çağrıcı, in Üzüntüden Kurtulma Yolları, Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2017, pp. 94–9. 30  Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, The Precious Pearl. A Translation from the Arabic with Notes of the Kitāb al-Durra al-fākhira fī kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, trans. Jane Idleman Smith, Missoula MT: Scholars Press, 1979. 31  Al-Ghazālī, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, trans. T. J. Winter, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1989.

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l-ākhira (‘Remembrance of the Affairs of the Dead and of the Hereafter’)32 and Suyūṭī’s Bushrā l-kaʾīb bi-liqāʾ al-ḥabīb (‘Glad Tidings to the Sorrowful concerning the Encounter with the Beloved’) mentioned above. An early-modern text worth mentioning is Nābulusī’s al-Majālis al-shāmiyya fī l-mawāʿiẓ al-rūmiyya (‘Damascene Gatherings on Turkish Sermons’), a collection of fifty sermons which he wrote upon a request from a group of scholars in Istanbul. Beginning with the sermon on Muḥarram the first month of the Muslim calendar, the collection proceeds to cover various topics ranging from the significance of the special days and nights, to particular acts of worship and rituals to be performed on those blessed occasions, as well as certain character traits to be sought in one’s spirituality, and ends with a sermon on death. This last sermon in the collection concludes with two short prayers, the first to be recited at the end of the year, and the second to be prayed at the beginning of the next.33 It is of special interest that ‘time’ stands at the core of Nābulusī’s collection of sermons: as it opens with the annual cyclicity, and ends with death, the linear directionality. These and other authors not only compiled sayings of the Prophet and influential scholars and mystics on death, and narratives of their experiences of death, but they also aimed to equip the reader with the knowledge of how best to encounter this inevitable reality of human existence, and how to turn the contemplation of death into a means for one’s spiritual growth in life. For sufis, the remembrance of death is a spiritual exercise of the utmost importance for maintaining one’s spiritual purification. In the Iḥyāʾ, Ghazālī dedicates a special section to this theme. In the opening of the book he writes that the heart of the man who is engrossed in this world is one who neglects the remembrance of death, and if he does remember, it is with regret for this world. ‘The remembrance of death increases such a one in nothing but distance from God.’ The penitent man, on the other hand, recalls death frequently. ‘It may be that he is in fear of death lest it carry him off before his repentance is complete […]; he is excusable in his aversion to death.’ Such a man does not abhor death or the meeting with God, but only fears meeting with God unprepared. Then comes the gnostic, who ‘remembers death constantly, because for him it is the tryst with his Beloved, and a lover never forgets the appointed time for meeting the one he loves. Usually such a man considers death slow in coming and is happy upon its advent.’ In Ghazālī’s view, above all these categories stands the man who has entrusted his affair to God and no longer prefers death or life, ‘for the dearest of things to him is that which is more beloved in the sight of his Lord.’34 So remem32  Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Qurṭubī, al-Tadhkira fī aḥwāl al-mawtā fī l-ākhira, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, Cairo: Maktabat Kulliyyāt, 1980. 33  ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, “al-Majlis al-khamsūn […] fī l-mawti wa-l-taʾahhubi lahu”, in al-Majālis al-shāmiyya fī l-mawāʿiẓ al-rūmiyya, ed. Hiba al-Māliḥ, Damascus: Dār Nūr alṢabāḥ, 2011, pp. 302–7, at pp. 306–7. 34  Al-Ghazālī, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, pp. 7–8.

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brance of death plays a pivotal role in Ghazālian spirituality and in the sufi path in general. In the Qur’an, death is identified with certainty (yaqīn) (Q 15:99 and 74:47), understood by exegetes as the certainty of knowing God. When Dhū l-Nūn (d. 245/859 or 248/861), a key figure of early Sufism, was asked at the time of his death: ‘What do you desire?’, he responded: ‘To know Him before my death by one instant.’35 So the seeker of God in his or her spiritual path would aim to find a way to reach at least some degree of this certainty in this world. Accordingly, sufis often speak of two types of death: (1) compulsory death (iḍṭirārī) and (2) death with choice (irādī). Compulsory death is actual bodily death, whereas death with choice consists of divesting oneself of the whims and desires of the ego.36 To die before death has become a maxim for Muslim mystics. God can be known (maʿrifa) only through His manifestation. For this to take place the seeker has to go through self-annihilation (fanāʾ) and subsistence (baqāʾ) with God. In Ibn ʿArabī’s system, the death of self and the resurrection to God are represented in the language of the dāʾirat al-wujūd, the ‘circle of being’. Being is manifest through levels of descent, tanazzulāt, until our own level of maximum differentiation is reached. Then through the perfected human being, the differentia are held in true balance and unity is restored from multiplicity.37 The saint still exists in linear time, but the dynamic of the cosmos, in which he or she plays a pivotal role, is emphatically cyclical. The five daily prayers, the fasting and other rituals recur in the cyclicity of night and day, weeks and months. Through the practice of dhikr, ‘the mystics relive their waqt, their primeval moment with God, here and now, in the instant of ecstasy, even as they anticipate their ultimate destiny. Sufi meditation captures time by drawing eternity from its edges in preand post-existence into the moment of mystical experience.’38  Ibid., p. 91.  Süleyman Uludağ, “Ölüm. Tasavvuf ”, DİA (Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi), Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013, vol. 34, pp. 37–8, at p. 38. 37  For a description of the dāʾirat al-wujūd concept in the thought of Ibn ʿArabī and his followers, especially Qūnawī, see William C. Chittick, “The Chapter Headings of the Fusûs”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 2 (1984): http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articlespdf/ fususchapterheadings.pdf#search=«circle%20of%20existence« (accessed 5 April 2020); id., Imaginal Worlds. Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity, Albany NY: State University of New York, 1994, pp. 173–4; id., “Ibn ʿArabī and his School”, Islamic Spirituality [vol. 2]. Manifestations, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, New York NY: Crossroad, 1991, pp. 449–79, at pp. 59–60 and 66–67; id., “The Central Point. Qūnawî’s Role in the School of ‘Ibn Arabî”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 35 (2004): http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/ centralpoint.html (accessed 5 April 2020); Sachiko Murata, “The Unity of Being in Liu Chih’s ‘Islamic Neoconfucianism’”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 36 (2004): http://www. ibnarabisociety.org/articles/islamicneoconfucianism.html (accessed 5 April 2020). 38  Gerhard Böwering, “The Concept of Time in Islam”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 141/1 (1997), pp. 55–66, at p. 61. For further readings on Ibn ʿArabī’s notion of time, see Gerhard Böwering, “Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Concept of Time”, Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit. God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty. Festschrift Annemarie Schimmel, ed. Alma 35 36

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One other example is to be observed in the thirteenth-century commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s work by a great female mystic from Baghdad, Sitt ʿAjam bint alNafīs (d. after 686/1287) who uses the imagery of death to describe the spiritual openings of a gnostic. She defines the eye of the inner vision (ʿayn al-baṣīra) as witnessing (shuhūd) God without a veil (ḥijāb), conjecture (ẓann) or doubt (imtirāʾ). It is thanks to this witnessing that the difference between the unveiling (kashf), sleep (nawm) and death (mawt) becomes apparent. Reflecting on the Prophetic saying that ‘People are asleep, and when they die they awaken’,39 Sitt ʿAjam suggests that the state of sleep, i. e. life in this world, equals heedlessness; it is through attaining the inner vision that one can reach certainty (yaqīn) before one’s actual death.40 This witnessing can only be attained with vigilance (tayaqquẓ), which would then lead to casting off (khalʿ) the outer body (al-jasad alẓāhir) in a state between death and life, not between sleep and wakefulness.41 Yet another example comes from ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūniyya (d. 923/1517) a prolific female sufi scholar from late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Damascus, who sees in the principle of ‘dying before death’ a path to complete union with the divine: So remember Him without wants or desires; be sincere and humbly hold to recollection’s rules, And persist in remembrance till you disappear from you in God, leading you, in the end, to obliteration in Him. In that loss, immortality will come to you with Him in whom you passed away, so live with Him, by Him, in Him.42

As seen in these examples, for many sufis, meditating on death serves as a means for the purification of the soul (tazkiya). In Ghazālī’s words: ‘Ignorance is the greatest death and knowledge the noblest life’.43 But here again we note a tendency to extend a formal teaching about linear time in the direction of an implied cyclicity. In the metaphor which compares spiritual apathy to sleep, and sleep to death, the possibility of an awakening, and a reinvigorated return to spiritual life, seems to relativise death, which is no longer a terminus, but simply another point Giese and J. Christoph Bürgel, New York NY: Peter Lang, 1994, pp. 71–91; Mohamed Haj Yousef, Ibn ‘Arabî. Time and Cosmology, Oxford: Routledge, 2008. 39  For the hadith, see ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī, Sharḥ ʿalā qaṣidat al-nafs li Ibn Sīnā, Cairo: al-Mawsūʿāt bi-Bāb al-Shiʿriyya bi-Miṣr, 1900, p. 95; Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān alSakhāwī, al-Maqāṣid al-ḥasana fī bayān kathīr min al-aḥādīth al-mushtahira ʿalā l-alsina, ed. Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Khusht, Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1985, p. 691. 40  Sitt ʿAjam bint al-Nafīs, Sharḥ al-mashāhid al-qudsiyya, ed. Bakri Aladdin and Souad Hakim, Damascus: IFPO, 2004, p. 225. 41  Ibid., p. 27. 42  ʿĀʾishah al-Bāʿūniyyah, The Principles of Sufism, ed. and trans. Th. Emil Homerin, New York NY: New York University Press, 2014, p. 95. 43  Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, p. 123.

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in a great cyclic return to the Source. For sufis, as Gerhard Böwering writes, ‘the paradigm of time is suspended between two days, the Day of Primal Covenant at the dawn of creation and the Day of Final Judgement when the world comes to its catastrophic end. Time resembles a parabola stretching from infinity to infinity, an arc anchored in eternity, at its origin and end, which reaches its apex in a mystic’s ecstatic moment of memory and certitude.’44

Conclusion To conclude, the Islamic tradition believes in the sacrality of life and celebrates it as the greatest niʿma or blessing of God given to humanity. This sacredness is underlined by the insistence on linear time, which makes life a finite journey, after which a different and intensified modality awaits. This is often characterised as the return to the origin, the timeless centre and transcendent source of existence. This has remained the mainstream Islamic position, held against the theories of metempsychosis (tanāsukh).45 Defined by our experience of this flow of time, an experience which is not God’s, for He is outside time, Muslim theologians and philosophers thus consider death, the terminus of earthly life, to be an essential component of the definition of being ‘human’. It is death that defines the human being, says Kindī. Death is thus not evil per se, for it does not mean to cease to exist, or a state of non-existence or nothingness. Rather it is a passage to a higher form of life, which is everlasting.46 To put it in Ghazālī’s words, man is ‘created for eternity’ and ‘there is no way for him to become non-existent’.47 Yet, the true nature of death is unfathomable by those who have not experienced it yet. This is compared by Nābulusī to the sufi experiential knowledge of God, which is based on tasting (dhawq). Likewise, death is a matter of tasting (amr dhawqī) and cannot be described in words.48  Böwering, “The Concept of Time in Islam”, pp. 60–1.  For further reading on the cyclical conception of time, see comparative studies such as Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, trans. Ralph Manheim and James Morris, London: Kegan Paul International, 1983; Ehud Krinis, “Cyclical Time in the Ismāʿīlī Circle of Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ (Tenth Century) and in Early Jewish Kabbalists Circles (Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries)”, Studia Islamica, 111/1 (2016), pp. 20–108. 46  Kindī, Risāla fī l-ḥīla li-dafʿ al-aḥzān, pp. 94–9. See also Mustafa Çağrıcı, “Ölüm. İslâm Düşüncesi”, DİA (Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi), Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013, vol. 34, pp. 36–7, at p. 36. 47 Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, p. 121. 48 Nābulusī reaches this conclusion when recounting a dream, in which he saw his dead sister. In his dream Nābulusī asks his sister about death, what is it exactly. First she turns away from him, hesitating to respond and when Nābulusī insists on his question, she then responds: ‘It is a matter of tasting, and you know that’. Nābulusī’s report of the dream and his own conclusion that death is comparable to the spiritual experience of the ʿārifūn, which can be known by experience alone, is mentioned in Kamāl al-Dīn al-Ghazzī’s (d. 1214/1799) biography of Nābulusī. See 44 45

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Death is crucial for the fulfilment of humanness as well as for the manifestation of divine justice and retaliation. Death facilitates the divine judgment in the eschaton, as the Qur’an declares: ‘The death you run away from will surely meet you and you will be returned to the Knower of the unseen as well as the seen: He will tell you everything you have done’ (Q 62:8).49 Here again we find the theme of the return, turaddūna: life is a voyage from A to B; but God is that alpha and omega; and hence we are part of a great wheel, travelling from garden to garden, Eden to Eden, vision to vision. Muslim conceptualisations of life are thus very much shaped by the scripturally-formed understanding of death. Remembrance of death is not supposed to lead one to lethargic pessimism, but rather to embracing life with all its unexpected blessings. This is best exemplified in the Prophetic instruction: ‘Even if the end of time is upon you and you have a seedling in your hand, plant it!’50 In Islamic ethics and spirituality, the remembrance of death not only promotes humility and dependence on God, but it also provides the possibility of transcending oneself in the spiritual path towards the Creator. A powerful tool for knowing God (maʿrifa), death also provides a theme for one of the most distinctive tendencies of Islamic civilisation: a synthesis of linear and cyclical conceptions of time. The Prophetic message insists on revelatory interruptions of linear time, whose reality is undoubted though always mysterious, while constantly resurrecting the Qur’anic love of pointing to the cyclicity which is nature’s experience of the world. The human creature, living a life both cyclical and linear, is thus a unique being, poised between creation and Creator, his or her life an experience of time in all its ambiguities.

Bibliography Alfonso, Esperanza, “A Poem Attributed to al-Ghazzālī in Hebrew Translation”, Mikan. Journal for Hebrew and Israeli Literature and Cultural Studies, 11 (2012) and El Prezente. Studies in Sephardic Culture, 6 (2012), joint volume, pp. 80–94. Baggini, Julian, “‘Day and Night Revolve as on a Wheel’. Time”, How the World Thinks. A Global History of Philosophy, London: Granta Books, 2018, pp. 107–15. Bāʿūniyyah, ʿĀʾishah al-, The Principles of Sufism, ed. and trans. Th. Emil Homerin, New York NY: New York University Press, 2014.

Muḥammad Kamāl al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, al-Wird al-unsī wa-l-wārid al-qudsī fī tarjamat al-ʿārif ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, ed. Samer Akkach, in Al-Ghazzī’s Biography of ʿAbd al-Ghanī alNābulusī (1641–1731), Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 482–3. 49  See also Q 64:7: ‘You will be raised and then you will be informed about everything you have done: an easy matter for God’. 50  Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ and ʿĀdil Murshid, Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1997, vol. 20, p. 251 (hadith nr. 12902).

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Böwering, Gerhard, “Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Concept of Time”, Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit. God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty. Festschrift Annemarie Schimmel, ed. Alma Giese and J. Christoph Bürgel, New York NY: Peter Lang, 1994, pp. 71–91. Böwering, Gerhard, “The Concept of Time in Islam”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 141/1 (1997), pp. 55–66. Çağrıcı, Mustafa, “Ölüm. İslâm Düşüncesi”, DİA (Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi), Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013, vol. 34, pp. 36–7. Casewit, Yousef, The Mystics of al-Andalus. Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Chittick, William C., “Ibn ʿArabī and his School”, Islamic Spirituality [vol. 2]. Manifestations, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, New York NY: Crossroad, 1991, pp. 449–79. Chittick, William C., “The Central Point. Qūnawî’s Role in the School of ‘Ibn Arabî”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 35 (2004): http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/ articles/centralpoint.html (accessed 5 April 2020). Chittick, William C., “The Chapter Headings of the Fusûs”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 2 (1984): http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articlespdf/f ​u​s​u​s​c​h​a​p​t​e​r​h​e​a​d​i​ n​g​s.​pdf#search=«circle%20of%20existence« (accessed 5 April 2020). Chittick, William C., Imaginal Worlds. Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity, Albany NY: State University of New York, 1994. Corbin, Henry, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, trans. Ralph Manheim and James Morris, London: Kegan Paul International, 1983. Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History. The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1959. Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al-, The Precious Pearl. A Translation from the Arabic with Notes of the Kitāb al-Durra al-fākhira fī kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, trans. Jane Idleman Smith, Missoula MT: Scholars Press, 1979. Ghazālī, al-, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2004. Ghazālī, al-, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, trans. T. J. Winter, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1989. Ghazzī, Muḥammad Kamāl al-Dīn al-, al-Wird al-unsī wa-l-wārid al-qudsī fī tarjamat alʿārif ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, ed. Samer Akkach, in Al-Ghazzī’s Biography of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641–1731), Leiden: Brill, 2012. Hirschfeld, Hartwig, “A Hebraeo-Suffic Poem”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 49 (1929), pp. 168–73. Ibn Ḥanbal, Aḥmad, Musnad, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ and ʿĀdil Murshid, Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1997, vol. 20. Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ed. Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, (s.d.), vol. 8. Kindī, Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-, Risāla fī l-ḥīla li-dafʿ al-aḥzān, ed. and trans. Mustafa Çağrıcı, in Üzüntüden Kurtulma Yolları, Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2017. Krinis, Ehud, “Cyclical Time in the Ismāʿīlī Circle of Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ (Tenth Century) and in Early Jewish Kabbalists Circles (Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries)”, Studia Islamica, 111/1 (2016), pp. 20–108. Al-Majmaʿ al-Malakī li-Buḥūṯh al-Ḥaḍāra al-Islāmiyya, al-Fihris al-shāmil li-l-turāth alʿarabī al-islāmī al-makhṭūṭ, Amman: Muʾassasat Āl al-Bayt, 1989, vol. 1.

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Munāwī, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-, Sharḥ ʿalā qaṣidat al-nafs li Ibn Sīnā, Cairo: al-Mawsūʿāt biBāb al-Shiʿriyya bi-Miṣr, 1900. Murata, Sachiko, “The Unity of Being in Liu Chih’s ‘Islamic Neoconfucianism’”, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 36 (2004): http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/ islamicneoconfucianism.html (accessed 5 April 2020). Nābulusī, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-, “al-Majlis al-khamsūn […] fī l-mawti wa-l-taʾahhubi lahu”, in al-Majālis al-shāmiyya fī l-mawāʿiẓ al-rūmiyya, ed. Hiba al-Māliḥ, Damascus: Dār Nūr al-Ṣabāḥ, 2011, pp. 302–7. Nābulusī, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-, al-Kawkab al-mutalālī sharḥ Qaṣidat al-Ghazzālī, ed. Lejla Demiri in “Death as an Existential Quality (Amr Wujūdī). ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Commentary on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī’s Poetry”, Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and his Network of Scholarship, ed. Lejla Demiri and Samuela Pagani, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019, pp. 363–422. Nafīs, Sitt ʿAjam bint al-, Sharḥ al-mashāhid al-qudsiyya, ed. Bakri Aladdin and Souad Hakim, Damascus: IFPO, 2004. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Traditional Islam in the Modern World, London: Kegan Paul International, 1987. Qurṭubī, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-, al-Tadhkira fī aḥwāl al-mawtā fī l-ākhira, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, Cairo: Maktabat Kulliyyāt, 1980. Sakhāwī, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-, al-Maqāṣid al-ḥasana fī bayān kathīr min alaḥādīth al-mushtahira ʿalā l-alsina, ed. Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Khusht, Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1985. Shaykhzāda, Muḥyī l-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Muṣṭafā, Ḥāshiya ʿalā Tafsīr al-Qāḍī al-Bayḍāwī, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir Shāhīn, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub alʿIlmiyya, 1999, vol. 8. Smith, Jane Idleman, and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn al-, Bushrā l-kaʾīb bi-liqāʾ al-ḥabīb, ed. Majdī al-Sayyid Ibrāhīm, Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur’ān, 1986. Tirmidhī, al-, Sunan, ed. Ibrāhīm ʿAṭwa ʿIwaḍ, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1962, vol. 4. Uludağ, Süleyman, “Ölüm. Tasavvuf ”, DİA (Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi), Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013, vol. 34, pp. 37–8. Yousef, Mohamed Haj, Ibn ‘Arabî. Time and Cosmology, Oxford: Routledge, 2008.

Part III: Belief and Devotion

‘The Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves’1(Q 33:6) A Scriptural Inquiry into the Anthropological Foundation of the Ittibāʿ al-Nabī (Sequela Prophetae) Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino Being a Muslim means to follow the Prophet Muhammad, being a Christian means to follow Jesus Christ. This simple assessment demonstrates very clearly that there is an interdependent relationship between to be and to follow, as far as this to be is considered theologically.2 This is not surprising as both Christianity and Islam are religions in which the founding figure is of a major theological, symbolical and practical importance, so that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad constitute respectively the central normative and spiritual references of religious life and thought. But whereas in academic Christian theology the anthropological significance of Jesus Christ has been intensively discussed,3 the prophetic figure of Muhammad seems relatively marginal in contemporary deliberations about the conception of man in Islam.4 The reason for this negligence does certainly not reside in the absence of theological resources, but rather in the 1  Unless indicated otherwise, translations of Qur’anic verses are from Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al. (ed.), The Study Quran. A New Translation and Commentary, San Francisco CA: Harper One, 2015. 2 Christoph Schwöbel outlines the enterprise of theological anthropology in the present volume as follows: ‘Theological anthropology has its specific characteristic in making both questions (the question concerning the human condition and the question of how humans acquire knowledge of their condition) dependent on a relationship to God’. 3  See, for example, Wolfgang Schoberth, Einführung in die theologische Anthropologie, Darmstadt: WBG, 2006, pp. 97–9, 112 and Giovanni Ancona, Antropologia Teologica. Temi fondamentali, Brescia: Queriniana, 2014, pp. 7–9. 4 In his Le personnalisme musulman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) and other writings, the Moroccan philosopher Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi (1923–1993) offers probably the most extensive elaboration of a contemporary Islamic anthropology, by basing himself on philosophical personalism. The personality of the Prophet Muhammad, even if addressed as comprehensive embodiment of the vicegerency (khilāfa), yet plays only a marginal role in Lahbabi’s considerations. See Markus Kneer’s introduction to his German translation of Lahbabi’s anthropological writings, Der Mensch. Zeuge Gottes. Entwurf einer islamischen Anthropologie, Freiburg: Herder, 2011, pp. 32–4.

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configuration of contemporary Islamic thought. It may seem a paradox that the ‘humanisation’ of the prophetic figure,5 and even his secularisation,6 has led to a simplistic emphasis on divine transcendence as logical ground for an Islamic conception of man – with the risk of reducing the meaning of human existence to an abstract concept which ignores God’s revelation of His Word as embedded in the concrete existence of the Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, both contemporary Islamic thought and academic research on Islam suffers from the reduction of the ittibāʿ (the act of following) to its normative and formal aspect. There are arguably no plausible and meaningful explanations for the outstanding significance of the ittibāʿ in Islamic history, thought and culture. Other than its mere normativity or Islamicised varieties of the ‘priest fraud’ theory (‘Priester­ betrugstheorie’),7 academic research has very little to offer in order to make plausible why Muslims never ceased to emulate a figure from seventh-century Arabia. The main thesis of this study is that one of the reasons why ittibāʿ alNabī seems to represent such an inscrutable mystery to academic research lies in the latter’s neglect of the question of how being and following are interrelated in Islamic scripture. In other words, how is the fact that the prophetic following is constitutive for Islam related to the Islamic view of man and of his destiny? Or put more simply: What is the human being such that he/she needs to follow the Prophet Muhammad?8 Starting from these interrogations, the present study argues that Islamic anthropology attains its fulfilment in prophetology, and that Islamic prophetology is grounded in anthropology; both are, in fact, inseparable. From an Islamic point of view, to theologically understand the meaning of human existence means to consider it through the Prophet Muhammad, and to theologically understand why the Prophet is to be followed is a means to consider his paradigmatic significance in relation to the human condition. In order to elucidate this issue, this study proposes an elementary analysis of what can be called the narrative anthropology of the Qur’an by relating it to the 5 See Abdelkader Tayyob, “Epilogue. Muḥammad in the Future”, The Cambridge Companion to Muḥammad, ed. Jonathan E. Brockopp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 304–7. 6  See Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino, “Conflicting Images of Muḥammad in Contemporary Islam and Secularization. The Critical Meaning of Prophetology in the Thought of ʿAbd alḤalīm Maḥmūd (1910–1978)”, Transfer and Religion. Interactions between Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Period, ed. A. Dubrau, D. Scotto and R. Vimercati Sanseverino, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021, pp. 337–67. 7  See, for example, Tilman Nagel in his Allahs Liebling. Ursprung und Erscheinungsformen des Mohammedglaubens, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008, where he argues that Muslim scholars enacted the veneration of the Prophet, and the ittibāʿ as its practical implementation, in order to convince the Muslim masses of the superiority of Islam and to stabilise their own social power. 8  This anthropological question actually implies a prophetological one: What is the Prophet Muhammad such that man needs to follow him? This interrogation, being one of the various ways anthropology and prophetology are interrelated in Islam, can only be addressed indirectly in this study.

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concept of ittibāʿ al-Nabī as it is represented also through the Hadith as scriptural corpus. The purpose is to open research perspectives on both Islamic anthropology and prophetology, and from this background to shed some new light on the multidimensional relation which exists between the Qur’anic text and the Hadith tradition. Besides the profound implications that these interrogations have for theological anthropology in Islam, it opens up interesting perspectives for a theological anthropology in interreligious dialogue. The sequela christi in Christianity, as expounded for example by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his inspiring book Nachfolge (translated in English as The Cost of Discipleship), published in 1934 in a context where Protestantism was instrumentalised by a group of socalled ‘German Christians’ to theologically justify Nazism, might prove a fruitful and promising theme for comparative theology and dialogue, not least in view of the current challenges faced by both religions.

Man’s Election and the Possibility of Anthropological Knowledge Regarding theological anthropology, Islamic theology is faced with a challenging situation: any Islamic anthropology has its basis in the Qur’an, but at the same time, knowledge of the reality of human existence, its destiny and fulfilment appear in the Qur’an as a perilous enterprise. Not only does the pretension to know what man is, in fact, have fatal consequences, but the very possibility of man’s knowledge of his reality is fundamentally called into question. This explains why the Qur’an, rather than stating what the human being essentially is, narrates how he came into being. In what can be called a narrative anthropology, this first appears when the angels ask God why He intends to establish man, a being who sheds blood and spreads injustice in the world, as His vicegerent (khalīfa): ‘And when thy Lord said to the angels, “I am placing a vicegerent upon the earth”, they said, “Wilt Thou place therein one who will work corruption therein, and shed blood, while we hymn Thy praise and call Thee Holy?” He said, “Truly I know what you know not”’ (Q 2:30). The angels’ argument is interesting regarding several points. Firstly, the angels characterise the human being in terms of injustice, violence and corruption. It is a conception of man which is based on the consideration of his acts and their consequences on the world. So the human being is considered exclusively in his historical existence as this is empirically observable. Furthermore, the angels call into question the dignity of the human being as God’s vicegerent by arguing the superiority of their total obedience and their direct knowledge of God’s transcendence. Nobody would deny the assertion that humanity brings about injustice and violence in the world, but is this all human nature is about? The Qur’an unambiguously denies this, though without offering a counter-definition of the human condition. God Himself simply replies to the angels, ‘Truly I know what

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you know not’ (Q 2:30), which could be interpreted as meaning ‘You do not know about man, his reality and his destiny, what I know’. Knowledge of man appears here very clearly as a divine prerogative. This is further emphasised in another verse concerning the creation of man: ‘So, when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My Spirit (min rūḥī)’ (Q 15:29; 38:72). As the Qur’an explains in another verse, the rūḥ ‘is from the Command of my Lord, and you have not been given knowledge, save a little’ (Q 17:85). Man cannot obtain knowledge of the spirit by himself. It is traditionally related that this verse was revealed when the Jews of Medina requested the Prophet to explain the reality of the rūḥ, the spirit, in order to test the veracity of his prophetic claim. The narration emphasises the fact that the Prophet could not reply before this verse was revealed.9 So here again the Qur’an makes it very clear that knowledge of what makes the human being what it is, its spiritual reality, is not accessible through natural means. The account of man’s creation continues in another passage with the figure of Iblīs. In Q 15:33, one of the reasons why he becomes Satan, the damned enemy of mankind, is his pretension to know man and hence his refusal to prostrate before him. Here again Iblīs’ argument for refusing to obey God in His command to prostrate before Adam, appearing as rationally plausible, is interesting. It is based on Adam’s bashariyya or ‘human nature’ in its corporeal and material aspect, and in fact discloses Iblīs’ pretension: ‘He said: “I am not one to prostrate to a human being whom Thou hast created from dried clay, made of moulded mud”’ (Q 15:33). Iblīs pretends to know that man is a being essentially characterised by his corporeal materiality and his mortality. He thus formulates a materialistic definition of man that denies any superior dimension. In the final analysis, the pretension to this knowledge appears in the Qur’an as a diabolic rebellion against God which leads man to perdition. The diabolic element in the narrative alludes to the inversion of the divine order that involves the misappropriation and abuse of God’s grace and benefactions.10 A further indication of this conception of anthropological knowledge is to be found in the prophetic stories in the Qur’an. As a representative example one can mention: ‘And nothing hindered men from believing when the guidance came unto them, save that they said: “Has God sent a human being (bashar) as a messenger?”’ (Q 17:94). The notion of bashar is a further indication of how anthropology and prophetology are linked in the Qur’an. Accordingly, reductionist knowledge of human nature leads the Prophet’s antagonists to think that a man cannot be a divine messenger. The contestation of prophecy and in particular of  9  See for example Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2017, vol. 3, pp. 56–7. 10 The materialist anthropologies of the twentieth century and the catastrophes to which they led show that this interpretation of the creation story has a concrete empirical relevance.

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Muhammad’s prophecy is shown to be continuing the argumentation of Iblīs; it is the fact of pretending to know man and of consequently reducing him to a certain aspect of human reality which leads the disbelievers to refuse divine guidance. The Qur’anic treatment of anthropological knowledge can be resumed by remarking that a purely human knowledge of man, or a human pretension to know man by himself, if taken in a reductionist and exclusivist way, is not only misleading, but has fatal consequences for the spiritual becoming of man. On the contrary, man’s pretension to know his reality without referring it to God leads him to become wholly ignorant of himself, or as the Qur’an puts it: ‘And be not like those who forget God, such that He makes them forget their souls [or: themselves]! It is they who are the iniquitous [or: the rebellious transgressors]!’ (Q 59:19). However, does this mean that in the Qur’anic view anthropology is impossible? Is man entirely incapable of knowing himself and would this knowledge have any theological, and in particular, any soteriological value? Returning to the account of man’s creation, it appears that knowledge of man is only possible when it is related to God’s providence as expounded in revelation. God’s proclaiming the human being as His vicegerent (khalīfa) makes it manifest that man’s reality is determined by divine choice and election. The pessimistic and reductionist anthropology of the angels, and of Satan, contrasts fundamentally with God’s repeated reminder of man’s singular dignity, and of its reason in God’s free grace and salvific activity. There is no doubt that this reminder, awakening in man the awareness of this fundamental fact of his existence despite its inherent ambiguity and fragility,11 is a constitutive element of the Qur’anic discourse and of the Qur’an’s self-conception. As an example, God’s statement ‘We have indeed honoured (karramnā)12 the children of Adam […] and We have favoured them above many We have created’ (Q 17:70) makes the election of the human being very explicit.13 Aiming at clarifying to man his existential vocation and his responsibility,14 the Qur’anic discourse of election equally demonstrates that knowledge of man is possible only in view of God’s gracious election and purposeful creation: ‘Did you suppose, then, that We created you frivolously, and that you would not be returned unto Us?’ (Q 23:115). 11  See Claude Addas, “Homme”, Dictionnaire du Coran, ed. M. Amir-Moezzi, Paris: Laffont, 2007, pp. 395–400. 12 The verb karramnā is related to the notion of generosity, al-karam, and to the divine name al-Karīm, ‘the Generous’. Hence, man is presented here as the object of God’s generosity and favour. 13 The exegetical tradition mainly stresses the various evidences of God’s honouring and favouring mankind, see The Study Quran, p. 715. 14  In legal theory, the Qur’anic discourse on man’s responsibility has been translated through the notion of taklīf, or the ‘imposition on the part of God of obligations on his creatures, of subjecting them to a law’, Daniel Gimaret, “Taklīf ”, Encyclopaedia of Islam. Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al., Leiden: Brill, 2000, vol. 10, pp. 138–9.

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The account of creation further indicates how God’s election of man and His grace towards him is made manifest: And He taught Adam the names, all of them. Then He laid them before the angels and said, ‘Tell Me the names of these, if you are truthful’. They said, ‘Glory be to Thee! We have no knowledge save what Thou hast taught us. Truly Thou art the Knower, the Wise’. He said, ‘Adam, tell them their names’. And when he had told them their names, He said, ‘Did I not say to you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you disclose and what you used to conceal?’ And when We said to the angels, ‘Prostrate unto Adam’, they prostrated, save Iblīs. He refused and waxed arrogant, and was among the disbelievers (Q 2: 31–34).

In this significant passage, the singular dignity of Adam is explained in terms of his receiving from God a comprehensive knowledge, ʿilm, which is beyond the scope of the purely transcendent mode of angelic knowledge. Besides the exegetical question concerning the objects of these names,15 it is interesting to note that the angels grasp the reality of Adam’s election only after God’s speech identified him as the privileged receptacle of divinely inspired knowledge. This shows that in the Qur’anic view, the mystery of Adam’s election is knowable only in virtue of divine speech, because it is divine speech, and the knowledge engendered by it, which fulfils the election and thereby manifests it. The first experience of revelation by the Prophet Muhammad is characterised in the same manner: ‘Recite! In the Name of thy Lord who created, created man from a blood clot. Recite! Thy Lord is most generous16 who taught by the Pen, taught man that which he knew not’ (Q 96:1–5). The historical cycle of the election of man as the object of God’s generosity (Q 17:70) is fulfiled in the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. This latter point needs further clarification.

The Challenge of the Historical Condition and the Existential Meaning of the Act of Following (al-Ittibāʿ) Similar to the Bible, the Qur’an establishes a distinction between two conditions of the human species, the paradisiac condition17 and the post-paradisiac condition. The latter comprises material existence, implying need and suffering, finitude and ignorance – and the freedom to disobey. Read from this perspective, the theme of expulsion corresponds to the entering of humanity into the historical condition, the ‘lowest of the low’,18 determined by the loss of the con See The Study Quran, p. 22.  The Study Quran translates akram as ‘most noble’ (p. 1537). Both renderings are possible. 17  See, for example, Q 20:118–9: ‘Truly it is for thee [Adam] that thou shalt neither hunger therein [in paradise], nor go naked, and that thou shalt neither thirst therein, nor suffer the heat of the sun’. 18  See Q 95:4–6. 15 16

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sciousness of eternity and the experience of time, but above all by the alienation from the direct experience of God’s revelatory speech. Whereas in paradise, God speaks directly to Adam and Eve and imparts knowledge to them in this way, after the expulsion mankind is apparently left to its own. Being cut off from direct communication with God, man literally ‘forgets’ his election and experiences himself as being thrown into the world without knowledge of himself and of his vocation: ‘He said, “Get down from it, both of you together, some of you [will be] enemies to others. And when19 guidance should come unto you from Me, then whosoever follows My guidance (man tabiʿa hudāya) shall not go stray, nor be wretched. But whosoever turns away from the remembrance of Me, truly his shall be a miserable life, and we shall raise him blind on the Day of Resurrection”’ (Q 20:123–124).20 This alienation, being part of God’s providential plan of salvation,21 is compensated for by the promise of guidance and the possibility of reaching an eschatological regeneration through the act of following this guidance,22 the ittibāʿ al-hudā. By putting the ittibāʿ at the very origin of the history of mankind, the Qur’an seeks to clarify the existential situation of human beings and the choices it implies. However, the Qur’an insists that the freedom implied therein involves a responsibility difficult to bear, as expressed in the verse of the amāna, the ‘trust’: ‘Truly, We offered the trust unto the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they refused to bear it, and were wary of it – yet man bore it; truly he has proved himself an ignorant wrongdoer’ (Q 33:72). The possibility of following this guidance, or not following it, as highlighted in the narrative, is developed further in the Qur’an. The ittibāʿ actually appears as a leitmotiv of the history of salvation. Man’s liberty to follow divine guidance or not to follow it determines 19  The Study Quran translates ‘if guidance should come to you from Me’ (p. 24) which is somehow misleading as the conditional meaning of the particle immā is related to the act of following and its consequences so that it could be paraphrased as ‘if, when guidance comes to you from Me, you follow it, then no fear shall befall you’. Theologically speaking, the conditional is understood as an emphasis of the gracious nature of divine guidance as something which is possible, but not necessary. 20  See also Q 2:38–9. 21  One could argue that the narration of the creation of Adam and the theme of the expulsion from paradise suggests that in paradise, man’s knowledge of God’s grace and of his election remains incomplete, in particular as regards God’s immanence. This theme is particularly developed in sufi thought, see for example Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, al-Tanwīr fī isqāṭ al-tadbīr, ed. M. al-Fārūqī, Damascus: Dār al-Bayrūtī, 2002, pp. 66–73 (trans. Scott Kugle, The Book of Illumination, Louisville KY: Fonsvitae, 2005), where the author explains ‘the benefits from Adam’s having eaten the fruits of the forbidden tree’. 22 The fundamental notion of ‘guidance’ has been too often interpreted in the sense of righteousness obtained through works (Werkgerechtigkeit) and of a Deus revelans legem which reminds of Christian polemics against Judaism and Islam, for example in Claude Gilliot, “Rechtleitung und Heilszusage im Islam. Perspektiven auf das islamische Heilsverständnis ausgehend von klassischen Autoren”, Heil in Christentum und Islam. Erlösung oder Rechtleitung?, ed. H. Schmid et al., Stuttgart: Akademie d. Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, 2004, pp. 39–54.

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the course of human history as this is presented in the Qur’an. Recounting the story of those who follow divine guidance and those who refuse it, the prophetic stories confront man with his existential need for orientation. These stories show that even if man refuses to acknowledge his need to follow divine guidance, he nonetheless does follow something or somebody: being ignorant of his own election, man is dependent on orientation and the act of following is constitutive for his historical condition. In order to demonstrate this fact, the Qur’an places in the mouth of the disbelievers various arguments against the need to follow the prophets and claims to disclose the invalidity of these alternative orientations. Several verses indicate that those who do not follow the Prophet in fact follow only their own hawā, a term that suggests a subjectivity animated by egocentric interests and desires: ‘Then if they respond not to thee, then know that they follow only their caprices (hawāhum).23 And who is more astray than one who follows his caprice without guidance from God? Surely God guides not wrongdoing people’ (Q 28:50).24 The refusal to follow the prophets is equally addressed in its collective dimension: ‘When it is said unto them, “Follow what God has sent down”, they say, “Nay, we follow that which we found our fathers doing (mā alfaynā ʿalayhi ābāʾanā)”. What! Even though their fathers understand nothing, and were not rightly guided?’ (Q 2:170). Like many other passages, this passage shows that the Qur’an very explicitly raises the question of the authority attributed to the one whom man follows. In the Qur’anic reply, the authority of social or cultural costumes for existential orientation is disqualified; only revelation, as transmitted by prophets, can claim the authority to be followed: ‘They are naught but names that you have named – you and your fathers – for which God has sent down no authority (sulṭān). They follow naught but conjecture (al-ẓann) and that which their souls desire (mā tahwā al-anfus), though guidance has surely come to them from their Lord’ (Q 53:23). Ẓann, conjecture and opinion as contrasted to knowledge (al-ʿilm), and bāṭil,25 the untrue, null and void as contrasted to the true (al-ḥaqq), are identified as two other things that man follows, if he does not follow the prophets. Some verses speak of following ‘the steps of Satan’, in the sense of rebelling against God, and these verses are addressed to the believers, since they have the possibility to be preserved from this through God’s mercy: ‘O you who believe, do not follow in the steps of Satan (khuṭuwāt al-shayṭān). For whoever follows in the steps of Satan, assuredly he enjoins indecency and what is reprehensible. And were it not for God’s bounty to you and His mercy not one of you would ever have grown pure. But God purifies whom He will, and God is Hearer, Knower’ (Q 24:21). 23 Hawāhum can also be translated as ‘individual inclinations and desires’. The Qur’an speaks also of those who take their hawā as their god (Q 45:23). 24  See also Q 30:29 and 47:16. 25  See Q 47:3: ‘That is because those who disbelieve follow falsehood (bāṭil), and because those who believe follow the truth (al-ḥaqq) from their Lord.’.

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These examples show how the Qur’an undertakes to deconstruct the human pretension to absolute autonomy and to lay bare its illusory character. The refusal to follow the prophets does not emancipate man from heteronomy, but makes him dependent upon and determined by subjectivity and psychological pressure, the (hawā), cultural-social conventions (mā alfaynā ʿalayhi ābāʾanā) or uncertain speculation (ẓann). In the last consequence, the Qur’an argues, these orientations are invalid (bāṭil) with regard to man’s vocation. In fact, they are expressions of an attitude of rebellion against God and against His providential election of man, a rebellion the possibility of which is introduced into human history by Iblīs and his refusal to acknowledge man’s election through prostration. It appears very clearly how the Qur’an seeks to disclose the naturalistic and thus reductivist anthropology behind the refusal to follow the prophets. Explaining to the Prophet why certain people do not follow him, the Qur’an at the same time argues that this refusal does not deliver man from his existential disorientation. By refusing to follow the Prophet, he is left to his own subjective desires, to customs or opinions. These, however, are not informed by man’s election and do not enable man to know himself as a being elected by God for His grace; thus, these orientations do not constitute guidance. The ‘temptation’ of giving way to the illusion of an autonomy from God is to be related to the notion of trial and challenge (balāʾ) with which the Qur’an characterises the meaning of man’s historical and worldly existence, the ḥayāt al-dunyā or ‘life in the base world’: ‘He it is who created the heavens and the earth in six days, while His throne was upon the water, that He may try you as to which of you is most virtuous in deed’ (Q 11:7).26 This ‘trial’ is salvific in the sense that it allows man to realise the breadth and depth of human existence, in particular its lower possibilities: ‘And We will indeed test you with something of fear and hunger, and loss of wealth, souls, and fruits […]’ (2:155).27 Through the possibility of choosing divine guidance in freedom and adversity, the historical condition offers man the possibility of ultimately fulfiling the plenitude of his election. Established by God as the modality of access to divine guidance, the ittibāʿ al-hudā represents the means instituted by God which allows man to successfully overcome this trial and to realise what he has been created for.

26 The Study Quran (pp. 567–8) resumes the main idea of the classical exegesis of this verse in this way: ‘The trials one encounters in life are not unjust, for God tasks no soul beyond its capacity (Q 2:286; see also 2:234; 6:52; 7:42; 23:26), but rather are a necessary part of one’s journey in this life; when met with the correct response, they can only help strengthen one spiritually, improve one’s character, and increase one’s love for God and trust in Him. From this perspective trials are a Blessing and a Mercy from God’. See also Q 18:7 and 67:2. 27  See also Q 3:142.

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Following the Prophet in Order to Know Oneself In the Qur’an, the promise of divine guidance (hudā) which God revealed to Adam after his expulsion announces God’s salvific intervention in human history. Humanity is not left to itself and to its state of ignorance (jāhiliyya), an ignorance which is as much an ignorance of God’s reality as it is an ignorance of man’s election and transcendent vocation. The prophetic cycles, of which the Prophet Muhammad represents, according to Islamic theology, the ultimate synthesis and culmination,28 constitute the historic manifestations of divine guidance. A prophet being by definition somebody who receives divine revelation (waḥy), the promise of guidance implies divine revelation. Divine guidance, having its root in the divine name al-Hādī, He who guides, is historically embodied by chosen human beings who receive the revelation of God’s word. The Qur’anic evidence about following divine guidance points in a very obvious way to the prophetic reality of Muhammad. What distinguishes the divine guidance represented by the Prophet Muhammad is its plenitude, universality and ultimacy, and thus its comprehensiveness: he is sent to humanity in its entirety29 with a guidance that elucidates every aspect of human existence30 and synthesises the foregoing manifestations of divine guidance by expressing their ultimate meaning in the most accessible way.31 Hence, Muhammadan prophecy is identified with divine grace and mercy in an essential way.32 The unique significance of Muhammad’s mission, being recognised in the world of contingency by the believers only, is fully manifested in the eschatological condition through the ‘station of praise’ and the ‘universal intercession’ (al-shafāʿa al-ʿuẓmā).33 These examples show that the conception that divine guidance and God’s mercy and grace are historically manifested in its conclusive plenitude in the Prophet Muhammad is part of the Qur’anic message. Considering prophethood in relation to the ittibāʿ al-hudā, the ‘following of guidance’ announced to mankind at Adam’s expulsion from paradise, allows one to understand that the anthropological and the paradigmatic meaning of prophethood are grounded in the Qur’anic doctrine of man’s election. As has been 28 See

Q 33:40.  See Q 7:158 and Q 34:28. 30  See Q 16:89. 31 See for example Q 7:157. 32 See Q 21:107 ‘A nd We sent thee not, save as a mercy unto the worlds’. Unlike the mission of the other prophets, Muhammad’s mission does not entail the destruction of a people, on the contrary, his presence is a guarantee for God’s mercy: ‘But God will not punish them while thou art among them’ Q 8:33. On this theme, see also al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, al-Shifā bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā, ed. N. al-Jarrāḥ, Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2006, pp. 39–40 (trans. G. ‘Abdel-Raouf Hibah, Ash-Shifa, Beirut: Dar Al-Kotob Al-Ilmiyah, 2013, pp. 60–3). 33 See Q 17:79 and on this theme al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, al-Shifā, pp. 133–8 (in the translation, AshShifa, pp. 234–46). 29

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shown, man’s election is fully realised by virtue of his receiving divinely-inspired knowledge through God’s call and speech. In the post-paradisiac and historical condition, characterised by the loss of direct and natural communication with God, it is the prophets who are elected to receive and implement the revelation of God’s speech.34 Hence it is the prophets, as beings who experience direct communication with God within historical existence, who realise the potential of the human state in its plenitude. This shows how the election of man and the purpose of his creation, being actualised by the revelation of God’s speech, become intelligible and visible in the historical condition through the prophets’ missions and personalities. Their concrete way of being, wholly transfigured by the revelation of God’s speech, becomes a manifest proof of man’s election and of God’s working of grace on him. The paradigmatic meaning of the prophets’ personalities is indicated in the Qur’an in various ways, in particular with regard to the Prophet Muhammad who thus becomes recognisable as supreme symbol of human perfection. Most notably is the Qur’anic statement ‘And truly thou [Muhammad] art of an exalted character’ (Q 68:4). Through the notion of ʿaẓīm (exalted), the Prophet’s personality is explicitly put into relation with God’s revealed word, the ‘exalted Qur’an’ (Q 15:87).35 The foregoing verse, ‘thou art not, by the blessing of thy Lord, possessed’ (Q 68:2), negates any influence of psychic or inferior order on the Prophet’s proclamation and personality,36 but affirms its root in the salvific action of God, ‘by the blessing of thy Lord’ (Q 68:2). In another verse, the Prophet Muhammad is called ‘a luminous lamp’ (Q 33:46) and ‘a light’ that comes from God (Q 5:15).37 Through the symbolism of light, related in the Qur’an to both revelation and knowledge,38 the Prophet’s being is disclosed as the locus in which the truths of revelation, and hence man’s election, become intelligible 34 This corresponds to the classical definition of a prophet, the nabī, being a person who receives the khiṭāb Allāh (God’s discourse). 35 The Study Quran translates ‘A nd We have indeed given thee the seven oft-repeated, and the Mighty Quran (al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm)’ (p. 652). The Hadith tradition confirms the identification of the Muhammad’s prophetic personality with the Qur’anic revelation, for example in the hadith: ‘His character was the Qur’an’ (Muslim, al-Ṣaḥīḥ, “ṣalāt al-musāfirīn”, no. 746). See especially Denis Gril, “Le corps du Prophète”, Le corps et le sacré en Orient musulman, ed. B. Heyberger and C. Mayeur-Jaouen, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 113–114 (2006), pp. 37–57, and in the German version “Der Körper des Propheten”, Trivium, 29 (2019): https://journals.openedition.org/trivium/6268#quotation (accessed 7 November 2019). 36 This is precisely one of the reproaches against Muhammad to which the Qur’an responds here. It is interesting to note that the argumentation paraphrased by the Qur’an is based on the Prophet’s human nature in contrast to the transcendence of angels, see Q 15:6–7. 37  This is one of the various classical interpretations of this verse, see The Study Quran, p. 284. 38  See Jamal J. Elias, “Light”, Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. J. Dammen MacAuliffe, Leiden: Brill, 2001, vol. 3, pp. 186–9. For a theological elaboration of the relation between light, knowledge and revelation, see al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-anwār. The Niche of Lights. A Parallel EnglishArabic Text, trans. and ed. David Buchman, Provo UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1998.

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and as clear as light for everyone to see. In this sense, it becomes understandable why the Qur’an can affirm that ‘the Prophet is closer39 to the believers than they are to themselves’ (Q 33:6) and why the Prophet, according to various hadiths, asks his Companions three times after his last pilgrimage ‘don’t you know that I am closer to the believers than they are to themselves?’40. The Prophet appears to be the mirror in which man can perceive the image of his spiritually realised personality.41 In this sense, man is asked to accord precedence to the Prophet over his own disordered inclinations by following him and thus taking him as existential orientation.42 Due to the total transparency of their personalities towards the divine word, prophets become ‘beautiful examples’ for their people, or, as in the case of Muhammad, for all those who aspire to the experience of God’s grace and presence: ‘Indeed, you have in the Messenger of God a beautiful example (uswa ḥasana)43 for those who hope for God and the Last Day, and 39  The awlā derives from the root a-w-l, indicating perviousness, closeness and preference, which can be translated also as ‘more entitled’, ‘superior to’ or ‘more worthy of ’. So, the closeness or priority of the Prophet is to be understood in a normative sense, too, ‘meaning he has more rights over them than they have over themselves’ (The Study Quran, p. 1020). Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896) offers an interesting interpretation of this verse: ‘Whoever does not see himself [or his soul] as belonging to the Messenger [fī milkihi] and does not see the patronage (wilāya) of the Messenger in every situation has in no way tasted the sweetness of his wont (sunna). This is because the Prophet is the closest to the believers’ (cited in The Study Quran, p. 1021; see also Shifā, p. 232; in the translation, Ash-Shifa, p. 449). On this theme see in particular Denis Gril, “Le modèle prophétique du maître spirituel en islam”, Maestro e discepolo. Temi e problemi della direzione spirituale tra VI secolo a.C. e VII secolo d.C., ed. G. Filoramo, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002, pp. 345–60 (trans. “The Prophetic Model of the Spiritual Master in Islam”, Sufism. Love and Wisdom, ed. J.-L. Michon and R. Gaetani, Bloomington IN: World Wisdom, 2006, pp. 63–87). 40  See, for example, al-Ḥākim al-Nīsābūrī, al-Mustadrak ʿalā al-ṣāḥīḥayn, ed. Muqbil b. alHādī al-Wādʿī, Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaramayn, 1997, “kitāb maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba”, vol. 3, p. 126, nr. 4641. 41  This relation corresponds to the principle of reciprocity expressed in a known hadith: ‘The believer is the mirror of the believer’ (Abū Dawūd, al-Sunan, “al-adab”, no. 4918). However, man’s perception of the Prophet is necessarily conditioned by the individual limits of the perceiver, as well as by the historical and cultural determination of every perception. The prophetic reality of Muhammad’s personality, being grounded in the revelation of God’s uncreated word, is not knowable to man in its plenitude and originality, as expressed in a famous verse of al-Būṣīrī’s poem al-Burda: ‘How can a people who are asleep in the dream of this world grasp his reality (ḥaqīqatahu)?’ (see also the alternative translation by Suzanne Pickney Stetkevych, “From Text to Talisman. Al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burda (Mantle Ode) and the Supplicatory Ode”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 2 (2006), pp. 145–89, at p. 170, n. 50. 42  In the Hadith this is interpreted as implying to love the Prophet Muhammad more than one’s own self: ‘By the One in whose hand is my soul, none of you truly believes until I am more beloved to him than his own self, his wealth, his children, and mankind altogether’ (cited in The Study Quran, p. 1021). For the various narrations of this hadith and a classical treatment of the theme, see the Shifā and my forthcoming “The Veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad between Theology and Hadith. Knowledge and Love in the Shifā of al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149)”, The Presence of the Prophet, vol. 1, ed. Denis Gril and Stefan Reichmuth, Leiden: Brill [forthcoming]. 43  The same term is applied to Abraham ‘and those who follow him’ in the Qur’an, see Q 60:4 and 60:6. In order to contour the example of Abraham for monotheism, commentators mention

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remember God much’ (Q 33:21). By elucidating that in the Prophet Muhammad man’s election becomes intelligible in his historical condition and thus in its integrity, it is not yet said how ordinary man can know God’s election and grace in and for himself. The anthropological meaning and significance of the ittibāʿ al-Nabī comes more fully to light here. Man’s knowledge of his reality as a being elected by God for the most supreme fulfilment of His grace is accessible to him, in the historical condition, in his relation to the human being in whom this is been actualised, that is, the Prophet. If man’s historical condition is determined by the need of existential orientation due to his incapacity to realise his election on his own, the Prophet represents the fulfilment of this need by God’s free grace. This is why, as we have seen, according to the Qur’an, the Prophet is the only one who is worthy to be followed; it is by virtue of the revelation of God’s speech and the perfection of human existence that he embodies in history. It can be understood that the Prophet has been sent ‘as mercy’, following the Qur’an,44 yet also because he unveils the graceful election of man, which at the same time means that his mission accomplishes the distinction between those who realise their election by following him, and those who choose to be deprived of it by refusing to follow him.45 The Qur’an grounds this decisive authority of the Prophet in the reality and purpose of prophecy which consists in calling man to God: ‘Say: “This is my way: I call to God, being upon sure knowledge, I and whoever follows me”.’ (Q 12:108). ‘Following the Prophet’ means following his call to God, so following him means to be responding to God’s call and to fulfil one’s election. This is so, argues the Qur’an, because the Prophet himself follows divine revelation: ‘[…] Say: “I follow only that which is revealed to me from my Lord; this is insight from your Lord, and a guidance and a mercy for a people who believe”’ (Q 7:203). In other words, following the Prophet means to follow the divine guidance that he represents: ‘And thus have We revealed to you a Spirit from Our command. You did not know what the Book was, nor faith; but We have made it a light by which We guide whomever We will of Our servants. And verily you guide to a straight path, the path of God, to Whom belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth. Surely with God all matters end’ (Q 42:52–3). Accordingly, the famous verse at 3:31, classically used to affirm the Qur’anic foundation of the ittibāʿ and its normativity, needs to be understood in an anthropological sense, too. In fact, this verse very directly addresses the fulfilment of man’s election. The the verse ‘Abraham said to his father and his people, ‘Truly I dissociate [myself ] from that which you worship, save Him who originated me, for surely He will guide me’ (Q 43:26–27), where the recognition of divine unity is related to the knowledge of man’s creation by God and the divine guidance which ensues from this. 44  Q 21:107: ‘And We sent thee not, save as a mercy unto the worlds’. 45  The prophetic stories in the Qur’an can be read along this line as history and typology of the ittibāʿ.

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pretension of loving God is made dependent on the act of following the Prophet: ‘Say: “If you love God, follow me, and God will love you, and forgive you your sins. And God is Forgiving, Merciful”’ (Q 3:31). It is significant that the reality and meaning of man’s election is disclosed in the scriptural context of the ittibāʿ: it is the dignity of being worthy of God’s supreme love.46

The Anthropological Basis of the Ittibāʿ and the Significance of the Hadith Tradition We have seen how the Qur’an makes use of the notion of ittibāʿ and establishes the sequela prophetae as a crucial motive of salvation history and of the historical existence of human beings. But the Qur’an does not explain what it concretely means to follow the Prophet Muhammad: How can one accomplish the ittibāʿ al-Nabī and where can one obtain knowledge about this? This fundamental question can only be understood on the basis of a comprehensive and dynamic vision of Islamic scriptures. Considering the history of Islamic thought and practice, it becomes clear how the Muslim community sought to answer this question primarily through the transmission and critique of Hadith.47 It is known that the various Hadith traditions of Islam emerged as the textual transmission of the prophetic teaching and practice (Sunna) and thus as its major scriptural source.48 In the light of the anthropological foundation of the ittibāʿ in the 46  The singular meaning of love in Islam distinguishes it somehow from the broader concept of love in Christian thought. If God shows mercy and grace to every created being, His love, proximity and intimacy is reserved for those who are drawn near to Him. The meaning of the canonical hadith qudsī in which God says ‘[…] My servant does not draw near to Me with his voluntary acts of worship until I love him, and when I love him, I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees […]’ has been especially developed in Sufism as referring to the experience of God’s love, see for example ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-qushayriyya fī ʿilm al-taṣawwuf, ed. ʿA. Maḥmūd, Damascus: Dār al-Khayr, 2003, pp. 476–7 (in the translation by Alexander D. Knysh, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, Reading: Garnet, 2007, pp. 325–6). See also William C. Chittick, “Love in Islamic Thought”, Religion Compass, 8/7 (2014), pp. 229–38, and his The Sufi Path of Knowledge, Albany NY: SUNY, 1989, pp. 325–31. It may be added that the Prophet Muhammad qualified himself as ‘beloved (ḥabīb) of God’ in relation to Abraham, whom he qualified as ‘intimate friend (khalīl) of God’, see al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, al-Shifā, pp. 130–3 (in the translation Ash-Shifa, pp. 227–34) where the abovementioned hadith qudsī is mentioned, as well. Love being inherently related to beauty, it would be interesting to reflect theologically upon the beauty (ḥusn) of the example (uswa) that the Prophet is and its relation to God’s love of the Prophet Muhammad. See Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger. The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, pp. 24–55. 47 See Jonathan Brown, Hadith. Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, Oxford: Oneworld, 2009, pp. 15–8. 48  There are of course other scriptural and non-scriptural sources of knowledge of the Sunna. However, the fact that the hermeneutical significance of the Hadith is the result of a complex historical process, which included contestations and ruptures, does not contradict its paradigmatic

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Qur’an, the Muhammadan Sunna has to be considered in relation to God’s will of man’s election. In this way, the deeper theological meaning of the Sunna becomes evident. The Sunna is not to be reduced to its normative and ritualistic purpose of implementing divine commands, but has to be understood from the basis of its anthropological reason as the means allowing man to realise his election, and thus the purpose and fulfilment of his human condition. Pursuing this line of thought, it appears that the anthropological perspective on the ittibāʿ al-Nabī helps to explain why Islamic traditions are so deeply interested in the details of the Prophet’s behaviour.49 The idea that this specifically Islamic endeavour – in fact a cultural achievement unique in the history of religions50  – to collect all available testimonies of the Prophet’s conduct, reflects the comprehensiveness of an Islamic conception of religious life, is certainly true. However, it does not make plausible why Muslims are interested in the seemingly most banal activities and aspects of everyday life which do not have a normative significance, such as the preferred food or clothes of the Prophet, his invocations in various daily situations, his way of walking or sitting, and so forth.51 Considering the anthropological foundation of the ittibāʿ al-Nabī, it is possible to understand that the slightest action of the Prophet, by the simple fact that he performed this act,52 becomes a possibility to experience the grace that God predetermined for man which is fully accomplished and concretised in the Prophet Muhammad. In other words, the Prophet’s acts and words make manifest and tangible his interior state or condition, the ḥāl,53 that is his experi-

role in Islamic thought and practice. Besides the fact that the Hadith has never been regarded as a static and fixed corpus (see Stephen R. Burge, “The ‘ḥadīth literature’. What is it and where is it?”, Arabica, 65 [2018], pp. 64–83), even those theological courants which were critical towards the hermeneutical primacy accorded to the Hadith did not query the Hadith as such, but the method of transmission developed by the Ahl al-ḥadīth movement and the normative authority accorded to it on this basis. 49  It must be added that there are various other possible ways to explain this theologically, for example according to the theology of revelation, to soteriology or eschatology. 50  See William Graham, “Traditionalism in Islam. An Essay in Interpretation”, Journal of Comparative History, 23 (1993), pp. 495–522. 51  In academic research, the most plausible and interesting explanation comes from Annemarie Schimmel (And Muhammad is His Messenger, p. 32) who explains that in this way Muslims seek to abolish the historical distance between the Prophet and themselves. However, this does not yet explain why Muslims feel the need to make the Prophet present in this way. 52 The Catholic concept of ex opera operato might be useful to elucidate this conception, as it shows how the sacramental quality of certain ritual acts and symbols result from their institution by Jesus Christ. 53  The notion of ḥāl and its use in the hermeneutics of Hadith have been particularly elaborated in sufi thought, see for example the oldest surviving manual of Sufism by Abū Naṣr alSarrāj al-Tūsī, Kitāb al-lumaʿ fī l-taṣawwuf, ed. ʿA. Maḥmūd, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadītha, 1960, pp. 31–7 and 147–65 (partially translated by Reynold A. Nicholson, The Kitâb al-Lumaʿ fî-l taṣawwuf, Leiden: Brill, 1914, pp. 27–35).

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ence of God’s salvific presence.54 As such they are to be considered as the expression of divine guidance in the historical condition of man. Following the Prophet by imitating his words and actions means to participate in the grace which God destined for man and which He accomplished in the Prophet Muhammad. This participation awakes in man’s historically conditioned being the awareness of his predestined election. Considered in this way, the Prophet’s words and acts, even those without apparent salvific or normative relevance, become intelligible in their sacramental quality as multiple ways of access to the state of election that the Prophet Muhammad makes manifest and accessible. In virtue of the principle expressed in the Qur’an that the Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves’ (Q 33:6), following the Prophet and imitating him does then not alienate man from himself – it is not an act of selfalienation or incapacitation – on the contrary, it is an act of self-fulfilment, if the ‘self ’ means man’s reality as constituted by God’s election and grace. The ittibāʿ al-Nabī responds to the fundamental interrogation of how to live in accordance with God’s choice for man, that is with man’s existential vocation as it is formulated in the Qur’an. In the last analysis, following the Prophet means to respond positively and totally to God’s call and to orientate human existence according to His work of grace on man. However, imitation as a way to accomplish the ittibāʿ al-Nabī55 is to be distinguished from simple mimicry. The ittibāʿ in fact describes a dynamic relationship between a tābiʿ, ‘somebody who follows’, and a matbūʿ, ‘somebody who is followed’, since the tābiʿ is necessarily imbedded in a certain historical and individual situation, and so is his or her perception of the matbūʿ so that both are constantly evolving and never static. Furthermore, unlike mimicry, the ittibāʿ transforms the tābiʿ as he/she is drawing closer to the matbūʿ, that is to the Prophet and to God’s salvific working that he represents in virtue of Q 21:107, ‘And We sent thee not, save as a mercy unto the worlds’. Without this transformation,56 and the moral and spiritual regeneration which it implies and which is operative by God’s grace on and through the matbūʿ, there is no ittibāʿ, as the Prophet himself made clear: ‘None of you has faith 54  For a study of this theme on the basis of Qur’anic evidence, see Denis Gril, “L’experience spirituelle du Prophète”, Dictionnaire du Coran, ed. M. Amir-Moezzi, Paris: Laffont, 2007, pp. 320–8. 55  If there is, in fact, a conceptual distinction to be made between emulation (sequela), i. e. taking the Prophet as guide and as an orientation, and imitation (imitatio), acting in conformity with him, both notions are evidently not mutually exclusive. Indeed, both are included in the Islamic notion of ittibāʿ, even if etymologically the latter means above all ‘the act of following behind somebody’ and ‘following the traces of somebody’, whereas the mutābaʿa from the same root means ‘doing something with great attention’ and ‘being in conformity with something’. The semantic field of this theme, including notions like iqtidāʾ (‘the act of taking somebody as example’) and imtithāl (‘making oneself conform to something’), needs further study. 56  The transforming force of the ittibāʿ al-Nabī is of course conditioned by the spiritual disposition of a person which is above all determined by the quality of his belief and the purity of his intention.

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until his individual inclinations (hawāhu) follow that with which I came’.57 Hence, the error of the formalist reductionism in Salafism and its historicisation of the Sunna. If the Sunna is understood as the ultimate historical concretisation of man’s accomplished election, it becomes clear that the act of following the Prophet implies more than just obeying him.58 It means to take the Prophet Muhammad’s way and state of being, as an existential orientation of which the acts and words represent only the exterior and tangible dimension. This is why the Hadith transmission as a theological resource needs to be re-appropriated by each generation of Muslims anew. Only in this way the ittibāʿ al-Nabī, with all its anthropological, soteriological and eschatological implications, and above all as an access to the prophetic experience of the Qur’an as God’s speech, becomes possible.

Conclusion and Research Perspectives The rudimentary anthropological elucidation of scriptural evidences concerning the ittibāʿ al-Nabī has made evident the prophetological centring of Islamic anthropology and its basis in the Qur’anic doctrine of man’s primordial election. It has shown that it is necessary to consider the concept of ittibāʿ in order to address fundamental interrogations of Islamic theological anthropology, in particular regarding the possibility of a theological anthropology, or the possibility of a theological knowledge of the human condition: How can one apprehend himself or herself as a being whose reality consists in their relatedness to God? How can the relationship to God actually acquire this constitutive and determining significance for human existence, so that it is not a mere mental construct, but that it effectively shapes all other human relationships and determines their finality? The argument of this study is that Islamic scriptures, intended here as the Qur’an and the Hadith, answer these interrogations primarily through the Pro57  Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Nawawī, al-ʿArbaʿīna ḥadīthan, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mecca: Maktabat al-Iqtiṣād, (s.d.), p. 28, no. 41. 58 Obedience (ṭāʿa) to the Prophet is equally an important motif in the Qur’an which constantly insists that obedience to the Prophet equals obedience to God, see for example Q 8:20, 3:32, 3:132, 5:80. However, the ittibāʿ, even though it implies obedience, goes further than the mere conformity to the prophetic commandments; it means taking the Prophet’s behaviour and attitude as a spiritual orientation affecting one’s whole existence and way of being. See the two chapters concerned respectively with obedience and following the Prophet in al-Qāḍīʿ Iyāḍ’s al-Shifā, pp. 225–6 and 226–8 (in the translation: Ash-Shifa, pp. 432–6 and 436–41). If the contextual meaning of obedience to the Prophet is laid down by the jurist, the meaning of the ittibāʿ is more in the domain of the Hadith scholar and the sufi, depending which dimension of the ittibāʿ is concerned, the formal-exterior or the spiritual-interior dimensions. For the latter distinction, see, for example, Tayeb Chouiref, Soufisme et hadith dans l’œuvre du traditionniste et mystique Égyptien ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī, PhD diss., University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 2013, pp. 127–61.

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phet Muhammad. It is through the Muhammadan ‘beautiful example’ (Q 33:21) that historically conditioned man can recognise and realise himself as elected for God’s grace. Hence, the meaningfulness of human existence, in its multiple dimensions and aspects, becomes intelligible in the one whose entire existence is transfigured by the revelation of God’s word. Understood in this way, following the Prophet means encountering the revelation of God’s word and thus it means fulfiling man’s existential vocation as constituted by God’s election and favour. It goes without saying that these findings need to be deepened. Besides an extensive exegetical analysis, including the chronological development of relevant Qur’anic themes, their contextual meanings59 and their interpretations in the exegetical literature, systematic and historical research is necessary in order to elucidate further the concepts and their relations raised in this study. For example, the Qur’anic doctrine of the election of man has to be analysed within the framework of the different Islamic disciplines and discourses and their respective anthropologically relevant concepts – such as the concept of taklīf in the normative hermeneutics of uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory), the notion of al-insān al-kāmil (the perfect human being) in Sufism – in order to elucidate how it is concretely related to the different dimensions of the prophetic practice. Furthermore, it would be fruitful to inquire how the intellectual traditions of Islam have developed the various aspects of the fulfilment of man’s election in view of the prophetic example, and how these concepts have evolved historically, in mutual interference or even in concurrence. Regarding modern times, the emergence of various modalities of the ‘Muhammadan way’ (al-ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya) in the context of reform movements, certainly represent very interesting examples.60 For practical theology too, the insights yielded by considering the ittibāʿ al-Nabī from an anthropological approach may open interesting perspectives. For example, envisaging an Islamic theory of human dignity and a theological social ethics founded on the fulfilment of man’s election as it is made manifest in the Prophet Muhammad. In view of the critical task of Islamic theology, it would be interesting to develop further the Qur’anic critique of naturalist anthropologies, most notably with regard to the experiences of the human catastrophes of the twentieth century and their different types of materialist definitions of man – be they individualistic or collectivistic. In any case, it appears that further research about the ittibāʿ al-Nabī or about Islamic anthropology needs to take seriously

59 Regarding Qur’anic anthropology, see, for example, Holger Zellentin, “Trialogical Anthropology. The Qurʾān on Adam and Iblīs in View of Rabbinic and Christian Discourse”, New Approaches to Human Dignity in the Context of Qurʾānic Anthropology. The Quest for Humanity, ed. Rüdiger Braun and Hüseyn I. Cicek, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 61–131. 60 See, for example, Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino, “Penser la ‘voie muḥammadienne’. Le renouveau soufi à Fès au XIIIe/XIXe siècle”, Studia Islamica, 3 (2016), pp. 109–36.

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the Qur’anic principle that ‘the Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves’ (Q 33:6).

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Lahbabi, Mohamed Aziz, Le personnalisme musulman, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Nagel, Tilman, Allahs Liebling. Ursprung und Erscheinungsformen des Mohammedglaubens, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, et al. (eds.), The Study Quran. A New Translation and Commentary, San Francisco CA: Harper One, 2015. Nawawī, Muḥyī l-Dīn al-, al-ʿArbaʿīna ḥadīthan, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mecca: Maktabat al-Iqtiṣād, (s.d.) (trans. Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies, An-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith. An Anthology of the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1997). Nīsābūrī, al-Ḥākim al-, al-Mustadrak ʿalā al-ṣāḥīḥayn, ed. Muqbil b. al-Hādī al-Wādʿī, Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaramayn, 1997. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ al-, al-Shifā bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā, ed. N. al-Jarrāḥ, Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2006, (trans. G. ʿAbdel-Raouf Hibah, Ash-Shifa, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2013). Qushayrī, ʿAbd al-Karīm al-, al-Risāla al-qushayriyya fī ʿilm al-taṣawwuf, ed. ʿA. Maḥmūd, Damascus: Dār al-Khayr, 2003 (trans. Alexander D. Knysh, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, Reading: Garnet, 2007). Schimmel, Annemarie, And Muhammad is His Messenger. The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Schoberth, Wolfgang, Einführung in die theologische Anthropologie, Darmstadt: WBG, 2006. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pickney, “From Text to Talisman. Al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burda (Mantle Ode) and the Supplicatory Ode”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 2 (2006), pp. 145–89. Tayyob, Abdelkader, “Epilogue. Muḥammad in the Future”, The Cambridge Companion to Muḥammad, ed. Jonathan E. Brockopp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 304–7. Tūsī, Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj al-, Kitāb al-lumaʿ fī l-taṣawwuf, ed. ʿA. Maḥmūd, Cairo: Dār alKutub al-Ḥadīth, 1960 (trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Kitâb al-Lumaʿ fî-l taṣawwuf, Leiden: Brill, 1914). Vimercati Sanseverino, Ruggero, “Penser la ‘voie muḥammadienne’. Le renouveau soufi à Fès au XIIIe/XIXe siècle”, Studia Islamica, 3 (2016), pp. 109–36. Vimercati Sanseverino, Ruggero, “Conflicting Images of Muḥammad in Contemporary Islam and Secularization. The Critical Meaning of Prophetology in the Thought of ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (1910–1978)”, Transfer and Religion. Interactions between Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Period, ed. A. Dubrau, D. Scotto and R. Vimercati Sanseverino, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021, pp. 337–67. Vimercati Sanseverino, Ruggero, “The Veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad between Theology and Hadith. Knowledge and Love in the Shifā of al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149)”, The Presence of the Prophet, vol. 1, ed. Denis Gril and Stefan Reichmuth, Leiden: Brill, [forthcoming]. Zellentin, Holger, “Trialogical Anthropology. The Qurʾān on Adam and Iblīs in View of Rabbinic and Christian Discourse”, New Approaches to Human Dignity in the Context of Qurʾānic Anthropology. The Quest for Humanity, ed. Rüdiger Braun and Hüseyn I. Cicek, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 61–131.

Mutual Influences of Christian and Muslim Anthropologies in History A Case Study of Sixteenth-Century Morisco Devotions Amina Nawaz ‘The best believer is the one who loves for his believing brother what he loves for himself ’. This is the parting advice of an anonymous writer from sixteenthcentury Spain, in concluding a manuscript focussed on worship and devotions.1 Without knowing the context, these words may be from a man or a woman, a member of the courtly or learned elite, a prolific scholar or a literate layman, or the work of a Christian, Jew or Muslim. As it happens, we do know more about this anonymous writer than just these words. He was in fact a Morisco, or among a community of Muslims living in the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century, who were also baptised Christians. His advice in this passage is written in Arabic and Aljamiado, or Romance vernacular written in the Arabic script. His manuscript was found in 1884 when a group of brick masons demolishing houses in the Almonacid de la Sierra region unearthed a collection of books and folios containing Arabic script carefully placed individually beneath a false floor.2 His version of the ‘golden rule’ is presented here as part of a hadith, or a saying of the Prophet Muhammad.3 1  MS Madrid, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, RESC/28, 152 fols. (Formerly J 28). 2 Many of these ‘A rabic’ books turned out to be Aljamiado. This cache of codices constitutes the largest single collection of sixteenth-century Morisco texts to date and the recovered manuscripts, for indeed many did not survive their ‘discovery’, were housed in the Biblioteca del Instituto de Filología del CSIC which is part of the Junta para Ampliacíon de Estudios CSIC Madrid (from here, Junta or Junta Collection). According to the priest who came upon the builders who discovered the false floor, by the time he had reached the scene the masons and workers had already burnt at least 80 of these works in a bonfire. See the colourful retelling of this episode in Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures. Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 68–73. The original catalogue of this collection is published in Julian Ribera and Miguel Asín Palacios, Manuscritos Árabes y Aljamiados de la Biblioteca de la Junta, Madrid: Imprint Ibérica E. Mestre, 1912. 3  The full text reads: ‘The commandment of God is to love and desire for our / brothers, the Muslims and believers, what you love and wish for ourselves. The Prophet Muhammad ṣalla Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam said, “The best believer is the one who loves for his believing brother

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Appraisal of this Morisco manuscript is critically linked with how its context is understood. When examined only as a ‘Morisco’ manuscript, apart from the larger contexts of the social and religious landscapes of early modern Spain and the Mediterranean, this work and others like it appear far more unique and singular. When assessed in relation to their wider circles of context however, it is possible to see how the textual interests within Morisco manuscripts are in fact at the centres of these larger circles. This echoes a point made by social historian Natalie Zemon Davis whose body of work demonstrates the importance of using ‘local stories’ in constructing ‘global’ histories.4 The purpose of this essay is to undertake precisely such a task by exploring the devotional interests and priorities of believers in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean and draw larger connections between religious experience in interreligious and pluralistic contexts. By examining the contents of Morisco devotional manuscripts from the sixteenth century, the essay shows how these works contain an overarching emphasis upon sacralising time, reflecting an interest which was shared by religious communities across the early modern Mediterranean.

Historical Context The landscape of sixteenth-century Spain was a fast changing one. After the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews, the Muslims were initially promised a continuation of the status quo in which they were able to practise Islam freely in exchange for a payment to the Crown.5 This situation quickly deteriorated, and by 1525 all the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula what he loves for himself ”.’ (MS RESC/28 [Formerly J 28], fols. 151v–152r). The hadith usually appears in the form ‘none of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself ’ and has been cited by the earliest Hadith compilations, both Bukhārī and Muslim, but it is most well known as one of the forty hadith cited and commented upon by al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) in his famous collection, see Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawī, Al-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith. An Anthology of the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, trans. Ezzeddīn Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1997, pp. 56–7. It is interesting to note that the Morisco work differs from classical renditions of the hadith by including ‘believing brother’. 4  Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History. Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World”, History and Theory, 50 (2011), pp. 188–202. Also see her comments made as part of a panel discussion for the Holberg Prize awarded in 2010. See specifically 2:18 and 2:53 for Davis’ comment. Holberg Prize Symposium 2010: Discussion, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LOjG98KNouE (accessed 1 October 2020). 5  Some of the points in the Capitulation Agreement include: ‘That no Christian should enter the house of a Muslim, or insult him in any way […] That their mosques, and the religious endowments appertaining to them, should remain as they were in the times of Islam [ …] That no muezzin should be interrupted in the act of calling the people to prayer, and no Muslim molested either in the performance of his daily devotions or in the observance of his fast, or in any other religious ceremony; but that if a Christian should be found laughing at them he should be punished for it.’ L. P. Harvey, “Capitulations of Granada”, Medieval Iberia, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, pp. 500–5.

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were given the choice of exile, death or conversion to Christianity. While some chose conversion, the vast majority appear to have been baptised but continued practising Islam, despite its prohibition. For over a hundred years, Morisco communities practiced Islam and wrote and shared numerous works about Islamic beliefs and practices, sometimes in secrecy and other times openly with the protection of their Christian landowners or neighbours.6 Debate within the Church about what to do with these communities ranged from those who advocated a more ‘gentle’ approach to conversion to those who agitated for the outright expulsion of these communities, believing that only ‘old Christians’ were the ‘pure’ inheritors of this land.7 Eventually these exclusionist voices prevailed and the Moriscos were expelled from Spain between 1609–1614.8 Thus sixteenth-century Spain is often seen as the setting for a great tug of war between those who believed that the Spanish nation was decidedly and exclusively Catholic and those who, by their very presence and practice of other faiths, resisted this rebranding of their ancestral homeland. Many scholars who study the Moriscos tend to focus on their ‘otherness’ within Spanish society as well as from other Muslims, but this is entirely predicated on two methodologically problematic approaches. First, the examination of extant Morisco manuscripts as exclusively the product of crisis and cryptoreligiosity and second, a notion of Moriscos being religiously distinct from their Christian neighbours, as well as from their Muslim co-religionists.9 This is largely because what we think we know about the Moriscos tends to cloud how we view their works. We see them as forced converts, largely illiterate with only a tiny minority trained in any scholarly tradition, isolated and cut off from other 6  L. P. Harvey, “The Mudejars”, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 176–87, at p. 184; Kevin Ingram, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, Leiden: Brill, 2009, p. xix. 7  Many of these dissenting voices are highlighted by Kamen in Henry Kamen, “Toleration and Dissent in Sixteenth-Century Spain. The Alternative Tradition”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988), pp. 3–23. 8  Mercedes García-Arenal Rodriquez and Gerard A. Wiegers (eds.), The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. A Mediterranean Diaspora, Leiden: Brill, 2014. Also Már Jónsson, “The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614. The Destruction of an Islamic Periphery”, Journal of Global History, 2 (2007), pp. 195–212. 9  The definition of Moriscos as ‘crypto Muslims’ is widely used by both experts in the field and scholars from other disciplines in both the English and Spanish secondary literature. Only a few examples from scholars writing in English include, L. P. Harvey, The Literary Culture of the Moriscos. 1492–1609 A Study Based on the Extant Manuscripts in Arabic and Aljamía, PhD diss., Oxford: University of Oxford, 1958; L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain. 1500 to 1614, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Mercedes García‐Arenal, “Religious Dissent and Minorities. The Morisco Age”, The Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009), pp. 888–920; Consuelo López-Morillas, “The Genealogy of the Spanish Qurʾān”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 17 (2006), pp. 255–94; Luce López-Baralt, “The Secret Literature of the Last Muslims of Spain”, Islamic Studies, 36 (1997), pp. 21–38; Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures; Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden. Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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Muslims and a fragile, persecuted minority community within Spain forced into more syncretic beliefs and practices. We expect their works to contain both obvious and coded theological manoeuvrings, and for their leaders to have created a kind of fiqh al-aqalliyyāt, or minority fiqh, under duress. However if we examine their extant works without looking for what we think should be there and instead assess what actually exists within their plethora of devotional texts, a different picture emerges. Of course, there are a handful of known examples of Morisco writings engaging with their political situation,10 but their religious works show a lack of theological preoccupation with the crises of their age. Instead, we find we find prayers, litanies, religious instructions, exhortations, and detailed descriptions of Islamic worship which, in short, would be at home in any Islamic context. In fact, it is the references to their situation within Spain or any kind of strategies for practising Islam ‘covertly’ that appear with extreme rarity.11

Morisco Writings In considering the historical realities that many Morisco communities faced as a result of the legal proscription of Islam, that we find any of these kinds of devotional writings at all is in and of itself surprising, given the risk that owning such works would have often entailed. This is further augmented when we explore their contents and discover repeated exhortations to maintain and uphold Islamic beliefs and practices. One of the clearest examples of how this takes place within the manuscripts is in the sermon passages from Manuscript RESC/25 (Formerly J 25) of the Almonacid de la Sierra Collection. The reader/hearer of this particular manuscript is presented with eighty-two folios divided into four sections of sermons for the occasions of ʿīd al-aḍḥā (festival of the sacrifice), jumʿa (Friday prayer), ʿīd al-fiṭr (festival of breaking the fast) and laylat al-qadr (the ‘night of power’). That sermons were included in this manuscript is itself interesting, given the climate of legal proscription of undertaking public acts of devotion such as gathering for a prayer, let alone the ʿīd prayer. What is even more intriguing is that these sermons articulate the fundamental precepts of Islam, as well as its most integral ritual and devotional obligations, as the following excerpts demonstrate:12 10  An example of this is in the Morisco letters to Ottoman contacts seeking aid for their situation. Harvey describes these efforts in detail: L. P. Harvey, “The Political, Social and Cultural History of the Moriscos”, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 201–34. See also, Vincent Barletta’s translation of the work of Francisco Nuñez Muley, an advocate on behalf of the Moriscos in, Francisco Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, trans. Vincent Barletta, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 11  See Amina Nawaz, Sixteenth Century Morisco Devotional Manuscripts in their Mediterranean Contexts, PhD diss., Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2016, pp. 94–121. 12 In order to convey the richness of the linguistic intertwining within these manuscripts, in my translations here I translate the Aljamiado and leave the Arabic phrases untranslated, but

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Servants of Allah, may Allah show mercy upon you. Allah tabāraka wa-taʿālā has mandated obligations and commands, He does not receive [you] without them and He is not satisfied with His servants without them. The first of them is the oneness of Allah tabāraka wa-taʿālā and to believe as certain (atorgar) His Lordship (señorio) and belief in His almalakes (angels), and His scriptures and His messengers and that you confirm this as true in what is apparent and what is internal (MS RESC/25, fols. 107r–107v). Narrated by the messenger of Allah [… benediction…] those who cease to love (desadores) laṣala (ritual prayer), no faith is theirs, nor charity to them, nor alisalām13 for them, and they do not reap the benefits of the words lā ilāha illā Allāh, nor the testimony that there is no god except Allah, and Allah curses them in this world and the other, and the almalakas (angels) curse them in every hour of the prayer, a hundred curses (ibid., fol. 109v). And perform the ḥaj (pilgrimage, from Ar. ḥajj) to the sacred (reverente) house of Allah whoever has the ability to go there in this path (ibid., fol. 111v). Know [O] servants of Allah that to Allah there are obligations upon us that He has mandated, and teachings (señales) upon us that are obligatory, thus the first of them is belief in Allah and his angels […] and in the day of judgement and all that has been narrated (rrazono) by our Prophet Muhammad ṣalla Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam. And Allāhu taʿālā has said it is an obligation to follow our Prophet and what has been brought by our Messenger so take of it, and what we have obligated upon him, be obligated by it […] And ṣala (ritual prayer) has been obligated upon us by God […] and of its sharʿa (rules) is to complete to complete [sic] elṭahor (ritual purification, from Ar. ṭahāra) externally and internally (pareçiente iyentirinsiko), to perform laṣala and to guard it with a present heart and be humble in it […] and elazakā (obligatory alms) is together in the Qur’an with laṣala and it is the pardoner (amaḥador) of our sins […] Among the obligations of lazakā is the one of lazakā delalfiṭra, that is at the completion of the fast of Ramaḍan, and Allah has obligated it upon all believers of Islam (ibid., fols. 163r–164v). It is ḥaram (forbidden, from Ar. ḥarām] upon you to slander the chaste/blameless by advancing false accusations (debantar [adelantar-present] falsiyas) and it is ḥaram to marry [your] mothers and sisters and daughters, and those who are forbidden and those who have been forbidden. It is ḥaram to mock or belittle […] [narration]: God has forbidden of seven grave sins (desturuyentes). They said, and what are they O messenger of Allah, he said, to put a partner (aparcero) with Allah, and killing one that God has forbidden the killing of without right (derecho), and consuming interest, and consuming anything of the orphans without reason, and defaming the blameless and ignorant (norantes) and drinking wine, and zina (fornication). And guard carefully […] against consuming interest, for it is the practice of the disbelievers (ibid., fols. 122r–123v). And [wine] is ḥaram upon those of islām and it is the key to many bad things and disobedience. And whoever drinks it in this world and does not repent of it, he will not drink of it in the other world (ibid., fol. 162r). transliterated into English. The word Allah I have left in text without transliteration, but include the Arabic so as to distinguish from when God (Dios) is written. I also leave certain ArabisedSpanish words and phrases transliterated to convey the way it appears in Aljamiado, followed by translation or clarification in parenthesis. 13  This could be either islām i. e. submission, or salām i. e. peace.

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The messenger of Allah [benediction] has said, proclaim the greetings of peace (publicad la salam) and give food/sustenance to the poor and draw near/help parents, and perform the night prayer while the people are asleep and you will enter aljenna (the garden) with peace (ibid., fol. 171r).

Immediately noticeable within the sample passages presented here is the absence of the dissimulative tendency so regularly ascribed to the Moriscos and their writings. The main tenets of the Islamic faith and devotional obligations not only lie at the forefront of each of the sermons, but are continuously reiterated, reinforcing the particular take-away message in different ways. Without any attempt to diminish or ‘water down’ this message, the key ideas are presented within a series of quotations from scripture and prophetic tradition which repeatedly underscore the unity or oneness of God (tawḥīd), as well as outlining several of the most significant religious obligations incumbent upon Muslims, referring to them as ‘pillars’. In this view, the contents of the sermons of MS RESC/25 would be at home in many Islamic contexts. Rather than encountering instructions for dissimulation and/or a ‘confused’ sense of religiosity as is the norm in Morisco manuscripts, it instead appears to be the exception. It is this feature in particular which reveals the overwhelming absence of ‘the crisis’ within their extant devotional manuscripts. In the contents of such works, we obtain a glimpse into the ‘positive’ approach of their producers, who appear to have prioritised what should be done, rather than articulating the mechanisms for dissimulation or the ‘negative’ approach regarding what cannot be done. This ‘positivity’ extends well beyond the bare minimum of religious obligations and includes a vast and diverse array of supererogatory devotions. Taken together, these texts augment and edify more general ‘calls’ to worship with practical details pertaining to the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ of Islamic devotions. Of significance here are the ways in which devotional practices are regularly linked with particular moments, from smaller measures of time, such as hours, days and nights, to more lengthy ones such as particular weeks and months. The passages below from a selection of manuscripts housed within the Almonacid de la Sierra Collection, contain several examples which demonstrate the dual emphasis both on providing specific information with regard to the performance of a full array of obligatory and voluntary devotions (which are often conflated together) as well as providing context for the things that may be recited and when they should be undertaken: The advantage of the Thursdays: The Prophet Muhammad ṣʿāma14 said: ‘Whosoever performs laṣala (ritual prayer) on the Thursday (dia de’l-khamis15) between the prayers of dhuhar and ʿaṣar (mid day and afternoon prayers) two arrakʿāsh (cycles of prayer) 14 ‫صعم‬

Shorthand for: ‫( صلّى الله عليه وسلّم‬may God send peace and blessings upon him).  Khamīs is the word for Thursday in Arabic, written here in its Aljamiado-Romance variant.

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reading in each arrakʿa, alḥamdu lillāhi once and qul huwa Allāhu aḥadun16 one hundred times, and when finishing the ṣalā, begs pardon from Allah one hundred times, he does not get up from his place but that God forgives his sins. And God grants him a reward like fasting rajab and shaʿbān [… lacuna …] for every arrakʿa, 50,000 prayers (cinquenta mil aṣala’es)’ (MS RESC/24 [Formerly J 24], fols. 75r–75v). [In a section on the ‘faḍila (benefit) and value of the day of Friday’] […] The day of aljumuʿa (Friday) is a day highly honoured and advantageous in the power of Allah taʿālā to serve Him with all the good works from laṣala’es (ritual prayers) and fasting and ṣadaqas (voluntary charity) and for remembering Allah and for reading the Qur’an. The Prophet Muhammad ṣall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam said that the day of al-jumuʿa is the best of days (señor de los dias) and the best in the power of Allāhu taʿālā for serving Him, and it is a festival (pascua) for Muslims (MS RESC/28, fols. 141v–142v). The first is the lunar month of Muḥarram, and it is the first of the lunar months and calendar of value to the muslīmes from the hijra of the Prophet Muhammad, [benediction] […] and the tenth day of this lunar month is the day of ʿashūra. In this day, God most High, confers (fizo Allāh) many miracles (milagros), marvels (maravillos), graces (gracias) and favours (mercedes) upon the believers from the laluma of Muhammad17 […] the third [month] is that of rabīu lawal. The twelfth of the day of rabīu lawal is a festival (pascua)18 for the Muslims because our messenger Muhammad [benediction] was born in it, he who was and is our salvation, for those who believe that there is no god but Allāh taʿālā only and no partner with Him and that Muhammad ṣall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam is His servant and Messenger.19 And this belief accompanies the performing and maintaining of the aṣalaʿes and fasting (dayunar) in the month of Ramaḍān, and the payment of the la zakā (obligatory charity from Ar. zakāt) or at least give voluntary alms (fazer aṣaddaqa) to the poor as much as is possible for you and with other good works. Thus, observe (guardad) this day as an occasion (pascua) and serve your Lord as much as is possible for you […] and send as many prayers as you can, upon our messenger Muhammad, by saying like so: Allāhumma ṣalli ʿalā sayyidinā Muhammad wa-ʿalā ālih. Send this blessing for part of the night, later into the early [morning] of the other day, for ten hours as much as you can, in the mosques (las meskidas) and in your homes (MS RESC/28, fols. 114v–119v). And the value of the very advantageous anefilas (supererogatory prayers) are the two arrakʿash of the dawn […] and the two arrakʿash after maghrib and after the sun has emerged three lanças (lances, distance of throwing?) in this time, perform the ṣalā de aduḥa, (dawn/morning) two arrakʿash up to twelve but at the least two, and two arrakʿash before aḍhuhar and two after. And two before laṣala delaṣar, and all are of great value in the power of Allah […] And whoever performs two arrakʿash in the middle of the night when the people are sleeping, it is of great value (MS RESC/32 [Formerly J 32], fols. 62v–63v). 16  These are two shorthand ways of referring to Q 1 al-Fātiḥa (The Opening), and Q 112 alIkhlāṣ (Sincerity). 17  Aluma is from the Arabic al-umma, or community. Thus, the sentence reads: believers from the community (or followers) of Muhammad. 18  The word pascua is often used in Morisco manuscripts to describe ‘festival’. This coincides with its earlier use in Romance as a festival generally, before it came to specifically refer to Easter. 19  Testimony of faith in Aljamiado.

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It has been recounted by the Prophet Muhammad ṣʿāmu that he said: The best days of all the year are the ten days of the month of du’elḥija. The ninth is one of the seven days of the year in which to fast, it is of much reward […] and whoever fasts the fifteenth of the month of dulqiyada is of much reward, and whoever fasts the seventh day of the ten days of dulḥijja is of much reward (MS RESC/32, 76r–v).

These are only a few examples from the manuscripts here which are teeming with similar passages encouraging their audience(s) to perform extra devotions with the promise of much reward in this life and the hereafter, while anchoring those devotions to specific moments in time. Morisco manuscripts are replete with such passages which encourage their audience(s) to perform obligatory and supererogatory acts of Islamic devotion, not in an ad hoc or random manner, but with a full range of basic to more complex instructions, and with attention to the quantity, quality, space and time in which these devotions should be undertaken. This aim is made explicitly by ‘the speaker’ of MS RESC/28 at the conclusion of the manuscript: O my brothers, much do I entrust you and much do I commission you to what we have said up to now (arriba), a great deal more could I tell you on the value of the months and days and nights from his sayings, but for the clever ones (diskeretos) this ordinary saying suffices: to a good listener he profits from a few words. And so, this little work suffices us for an order/structure (rijimiento) in the time, that now we reach (fols. 150v–151r).

The ‘positive’ theology in these works is not simply getting through or passing the time or waiting for its end, but to make the most of every possible moment of time, with devotion to God, through belief and works. While this emphasis is sometimes explicitly stated, such as in MS RESC/28, it is more often the case that the content is presented without preamble, introduction or explication of context. Thus, the more predominant way this overall interest in structure and time manifests in their manuscripts is with a kind of implicit assumption of their function and intent. It is as if the communities who wrote and owned these works needed no justifications or explanations regarding the contents included for the purpose(s) and role(s) of the works. Put another way, the textual emphasis upon devotions, informed by notions of sacred time that we find here, were perhaps so ordinary within the world view(s) of the communities to whom these manuscripts belonged, that it needed little flagging as a ‘purpose’ for producing these works.

Contextualising in the Mediterranean Milieu While many aspects of Morisco manuscripts are indeed particular, in the specific linguistic and confessional tailoring to their communities, insofar as the dominant interests themselves are concerned the Moriscos were very much

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participants in the wider ‘mainstream’ devotional milieu of the early modern Mediterranean. Within Islamic worship, emphasis upon structure and notions of sacred time are imbued into the very heart of Islamic devotions from its earliest history. With the reliance upon the movements of earth, moon and sun, the Islamic calendar, like most other pre-modern calendars, maintains an inextricable link between time and religious worship.20 This is particularly resonant in the daily life of a Muslim with the obligatory five daily ritual prayers (ṣalāt), the timings of which are determined by the movement and light of the sun. With the day punctuated by intervals of obligatory offered prayers, and the prayer itself a formalised ritual, structured worship is a fundamental trait of Islamic devotions. This is part of the reason why extant Islamic sources, far beyond the Morisco context, also demonstrate the popularity of these kinds of compilations, manuals and handbooks, in Arabic as well as in a multitudinous number of vernaculars.21 By the sixteenth century, common texts pertaining to Muslim devotions included books of litanies such as awrād and aḥzāb collections, various summations of key jurists and their jurisprudential positions, and condensed philosophical and theological works known as mukhtaṣar, and other miscellaneous guidance texts such as the Iḥyā ʿulūm al-dīn by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) or the Shifāʾ of Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149), both of which the Moriscos were familiar with, based on the presence of passages of such works present within Morisco manuscripts.22 As organised Sufi orders also became more numerous across the two shores of the Mediterranean, so too did their literature, particularly the devotional litanies and texts on regimented worship, which proliferated among the Muslims, and also the Christians and Jews under their rule. In their wider Islamic contexts then, the majority of the contents of these manuscripts are so ‘standard’, that seeking their ‘Morisco’ features becomes even more difficult. This is also visible, and perhaps more surprisingly so, when we contextualise these works within the sixteenth-century milieu of a predominantly Catholic Spain. From the Christian context, earlier texts like The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (1229–1298), which laid out a systematic calendar of wor20  Stephen P. Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam. Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 21  Perhaps the reason that very few scholars attempt to consider these kinds of manuscripts as akin to others is the very practical reason that they are often referred to in such different ways depending on the vernaculars. This is true even in one region, such as the subcontinent for instance, where these kinds of works are referred to as waẓīfa (pl. waẓāʾif), panjsuras, fazale-amal, talīmul-Qurʾān, to name only a few. 22 Devin Stewart also highlights the way such sources are alluded to by Morisco writers, citing an instance when Morisco exile, Aḥmad ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī (d. c.1050/1640) justifies lying about his beliefs by referring to a principle from the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn by Ghazālī. See Devin Stewart, “Dissimulation in Sunni Islam and Morisco Taqiyya”, Al-Qantara, 34 (2013), pp. 439–90, at pp. 480–1.

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ship, helped spur the popularity of the vernacular prayerbook organised according to a devotional calendar.23 Historians of Christian religious praxis in the sixteenth century also demonstrate that at a ‘non-elite’ level, local calendars based around patron saints and other locally significant events were common throughout early modern Spain.24 The more popular of such works among Christian audiences from the sixteenth century have been outlined by Allison Weber who remarks, ‘In fact, after books of hours, and hagiographies, guidebooks to prayer constituted one of the most popular genres of religious literature during the sixteenth century. Between 1500–1559 more than 22 different guidebooks to prayer were published in Castilian, many of these in multiple editions’.25 Made even more accessible by the invention of the printing press and the widely available printed books, the sixteenth century saw a further increase in these kinds of texts. Devotional works like the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, and the numerous Breviary texts that organised ritual worship into specific times of the day and calendar year, provided handbooks of moral and religious guidance and made this kind of content widely accessible to audiences in numerous vernaculars.26 A particularly illustrative set of examples here, is in the many devotional works we find printed in sixteenth-century France with manuals containing instructions such as, ‘Here begins a little instructional manual and way of life for a [Catholic] laywoman: how she ought to conduct herself in thought, in word, and in deed the length of the day, and for all the days of her life, in order

23  See the introduction to the new translation of the Legenda Aurea for an excellent discussion of the context and history of this text in, Jacobus De Voragine and William Granger Ryan (trans.), The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. While there is no space to discuss this at present, we also come across ample examples from the Genizah collection which contains manuscript fragments which regularly highlight the spiritually significant days in the Jewish and Islamic calendars. See S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999. 24  William A. Christian, demonstrates that villages also had their own particular calendars based on local reported miracles and sacred moments. William A. Christian, Local Religion in 16th-Century Spain, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 174. 25  Allison Weber, “Religious Literature in Early Modern Spain”, The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David Gies, pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 149– 58. She contextualises the popularity of this genre in the context of particular methods of Catholic devotions that were raising concerns among the learned churchmen. 26 Elena Carrera discusses the popularity of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis as an example. His work, which focussed on methodical, structured devotions had far-reaching appeal in sixteenth-century Spain. Carrera notes that Cardinal Cisneros widely disseminated these works in Spanish vernacular through his printing house in Alcala and wanted them to be an active part of the instruction manuals. See Elena Carrera, Teresa of Avila’s Autobiography. Authority, Power and the Self in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Spain, London: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2005, pp. 19–41.

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to please Our Lord Jesus Christ and to amass celestial riches for the profit and salvation of her soul’.27 The almost verbatim parallels in Morisco manuscripts with the kind of excerpt from this manual for the Catholic laywoman are many. More than parallels, sometimes we even find evidence of direct interreligious referencing, such as the famous example of the scribe, ‘Mancebo de Arevalo’, or the Young Man from Arevalo.28 Like the vast majority of Morisco devotional manuscripts, his works repeatedly make references and citations to other authors within the Islamic tradition. It has been demonstrated by Gregorio Fonseca Antuña that the Mancebo’s works include direct passages from Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, removing any overtly Christian or Trinitarian sensibilities and falsely attributing them to known Islamic scholars such as Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī and others.29 We also have such cases within the more common anonymous manuscripts, such as the inclusion of the parable of the prodigal son in a work entitled ‘The Preaching on the Night of Destiny or Laylat al-Qadr” in the sermons of MS RESC/25 referred to above.30 As we cannot know at what stage these particular references from Christian works entered into the Muslim devotional texts, inferring a particular sixteenth-century ‘appropriation’ may be reading more into the manuscripts than is actually there. What we can surmise from the appearance of such overt references is the ways in which different religious communities appear to have been able to draw upon multiple traditions, in their own articulations of their shared interests in the structuring of time around the worship of God.

27  This particular reference is from Thomas Head, “A Sixteenth Century Devotional Manual for Catholic Laywomen”, Vox Benedictina. A Journal of Translations from Monastic Sources, 4 (1987), pp. 40–59. Also, regarding the phenomenon of large scale printing of such works from French printing houses, see the fascinating research conducted in Robert M. Kingdon, “The Plantin Breviaries. A Case Study in the Sixteenth-Century Business Operations of a Publishing House”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 22 (1960), pp. 133–50. 28  Harvey provides a very comprehensive analysis of this ‘young man’ with reference to his context, biography, scholarly controversies and a highly useful compilation of the most interesting of his selected passages. See L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, and specifically his biographical information begins at p. 178; L. P. Harvey, “Castilian ‘Mancebo’ as a Calque of Arabic ʿAbd, or How El Mancebo de Arévalo Got His Name”, Modern Philology, 65 (1967), pp. 130–2; L.P Harvey, “El Mancebo De Arévalo and His Treatises on Islamic Faith and Practice”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 10 (1999), pp. 249–76. 29  Gregorio Fonseca Antuña, Sumario de La Relación Y Ejercicio Espiritual Sacado Y Declarado Por El Mancebo de Arévalo En Nuestra Lengua Castellana, Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2002. 30 The cataloguers of the Junta Collection were the first to point out the inclusion of this parable with the sermon of MS J 25, fol. 176v. See Ribera and Asín, Manuscritos, pp. 110–1. The Aljamiado reads ‘[…] he stood up and he turned to his father, being separated from him. And his father saw him and seeing him afterwards he threw himself [into his arms] and hugged him and the son said to the father, O Father, I have repented before Allah and before you. I do not deserve to be called your son.’

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The critical point to be drawn from all of this is that the Moriscos’ interest in structure and time appears to be less a response to their particular circumstances and more a reflection of concerns of the ‘everyman’ in this period. What we see here then, is more than purely ‘lamentation’ or ‘resistance’ literature and more complex than a minority resistance against a dominant and overbearing majority. We also see participation, engagement, cultivation and even confidence that the communities who wrote and owned these devotional manuscripts believed that works which articulated the why, how, what and when of Islamic worship in a largely Catholic sixteenth-century Spain were not only possible, but natural.

Conclusion The case of the Moriscos as a microcosm for the larger story of human experiencing of theology and religion is a particularly interesting one firstly given the time and place in which they lived. The sixteenth century is the period in which Europe would begin to see some of the most dramatic cultural shifts in history including the Protestant Reformation, the exploration, conquest and colonisation of the Americas and the Indian Ocean region, a long ongoing conflict and engagement with the Ottoman Empire and of course, the steady march towards an age of modernity in which religious beliefs and practices become ever more contested in the public space. In many ways, the assault on religious pluralism in sixteenth-century Spain was a direct response to, and catalyst for, the seismic shifts initiated during this period. And yet in the midst of this assault, the Morisco case shows that even when pluralism is threatened with a monoculture, it survives among people who hold radically different beliefs, but share much in their experience of belief, in what they do to foster belief and the most important task of their daily acts of religious devotion. No matter how much the emerging machinery of the Spanish Inquisition attempted to exert power over individual belief, it could not control what Muslims would perhaps view as the very fiṭrī, or innate, human ways of turning toward God. A ‘shared devotional space’ then, once unconsciously created, is almost impossible to destroy. Until of course, devotion itself ceases to be practised. The case of the Moriscos demonstrates that when the nomos of a society is devotion to and belief in God, it may be possible for believers with markedly different theologies to share more in their spiritual proclivities, and lived, everyday experiences even in times of conflict. This is a radically different perspective to that of many modern day critics of religion, new atheism for instance, which argues that in the court of human justice, religion should be in the dock for its catastrophically divisive role in history. This view is misguided however, in

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only looking at the top down, centrist, narrative of conquerors. What it fails to recognise is the social history of the intertwined lives of ‘ordinary people’. To this day, the most comprehensive and sensitive scholarly work on Islamic devotions is written by an early twentieth-century Christian missionary, named Constance E. Padwick.31 As a devout believer, Padwick was able to convey the depth of Islamic devotion, because of what we may call her ability to engage in ‘anthropological theology’. She could embed herself in the Islamic devotional world because she shared the ‘love language’ of religious devotion. Christians and Muslims have much to teach about the struggles of their peoples, but also about the long and enduring history of this shared devotional space and the resulting human capacity for empathy, even, and especially, through historical moments of crisis.

Bibliography Antuña, Gregorio Fonseca, Sumario de La Relación Y Ejercicio Espiritual Sacado Y Declarado Por El Mancebo de Arévalo En Nuestra Lengua Castellana, Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2002. Barletta, Vincent, Covert Gestures. Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Blake, Stephen P. Time in Early Modern Islam. Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Carrera, Elena, Teresa of Avila’s Autobiography. Authority, Power and the Self in MidSixteenth-Century Spain, London: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2005. Chittick, William C, The Sufi Path of Knowledge. Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2010. Christian, William A., Local Religion in 16th-Century Spain, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Decentering History. Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World”, History and Theory, 50 (2011), pp. 188–202. Davis, Natalie Zemon, Holberg Prize Symposium 2010: Discussion, 2013: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=LOjG98KNouE (accessed 1 October 2020). García-Arenal, Mercedes, “Religious Dissent and Minorities. The Morisco Age”, The Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009), pp. 888–920. García-Arenal Rodriquez, Mercedes and Gerard A. Wiegers (eds.), The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. A Mediterranean Diaspora, Leiden: Brill, 2014. Goitein, S. D., A Mediterranean Society. The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999. Harvey, L. P., “The Literary Culture of the Moriscos. 1492–1609 a Study Based on the Extant Manuscripts in Arabic and Aljamía”, PhD diss., Oxford: University of Oxford, 1958. 31  Constance Evelyn Padwick, Muslim Devotions. A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use, Oxford: Oneworld, 1961; William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge. Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2010, pp. 325–31.

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Harvey, L. P., “Castilian ‘Mancebo’ as a Calque of Arabic ʿAbd, or How El Mancebo de Arévalo Got His Name”, Modern Philology, 65/2 (1967), pp. 130–2. Harvey, L. P., “The Mudejars”, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 176–87. Harvey, L. P., “The Political, Social and Cultural History of the Moriscos”, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 201–34. Harvey, L. P., “Capitulations of Granada”, Medieval Iberia, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, pp. 500–5. Harvey, L. P., “El Mancebo De Arévalo and His Treatises on Islamic Faith and Practice”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 10 (1999), pp. 249–76. Harvey, L. P., Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Head, Thomas, “A Sixteenth Century Devotional Manual for Catholic Laywomen”, Vox Benedictina. A Journal of Translations from Monastic Sources, 4 (1987), pp. 40–59. Ingram, Kevin, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, Leiden: Brill, 2009. Jónsson, Már, “The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614. The Destruction of an Islamic Periphery”, Journal of Global History, 2 (2007), pp. 195–212. Kamen, Henry, “Toleration and Dissent in Sixteenth-Century Spain. The Alternative Tradition”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988), pp. 3–23. Kingdon, Robert M., “The Plantin Breviaries. A Case Study in the Sixteenth-Century Business Operations of a Publishing House”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 22 (1960), pp. 133–50. López-Morillas, Consuelo, “The Genealogy of the Spanish Qurʾān”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 17 (2006), pp. 255–94. López-Baralt, Luce, “The Secret Literature of the Last Muslims of Spain”, Islamic Studies, 36 (1997), pp. 21–38. Muley, Francisco Núñez, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, trans. Vincent Barletta, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Nawawī, Yahya ibn Sharaf al-, Al-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith. An Anthology of the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, trans. Ezzddin Ibraham and Denys Johnson-Davies, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1997. Nawaz, Amina, Sixteenth Century Morisco Devotional Manuscripts in their Mediterranean Contexts, PhD diss., Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2016. Padwick, Constance E., Muslim Devotions. A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use, Oxford: Oneworld, 1961. Perry, Mary Elizabeth, The Handless Maiden. Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Ribera, Julian, and Miguel Asín Palacios, Manuscritos Árabes y Aljamiados de la Biblioteca de la Junta, Madrid: Imprint Ibérica E. Mestre, 1912. Stewart, Devin, “Dissimulation in Sunni Islam and Morisco Taqiyya”, Al-Qantara, 34 (2013), pp. 439–490. Voragine, Jacobus De, and William Granger Ryan (trans.), The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Weber, Allison, “Religious Literature in Early Modern Spain”, The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 149–58.

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Manuscripts Madrid, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, RESC/24 (Also tagged as J 24). Madrid, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, RESC/25 (Also tagged as J 25). Madrid, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, RESC/28 (Also tagged as J 28). Madrid, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, RESC/32 (Also tagged as J 32).

Part IV: The Child in Human Becoming

The Anthropology of the Child Opportunities and Challenges for a Neglected Topic in Christian-Muslim Dialogue Friedrich Schweitzer So far, at least to my knowledge, the anthropology of the child has rarely been a topic in the context of Christian-Muslim dialogue. This might sound surprising, since clearly religious education has been an especially lively and fruitful field of encounter and cooperation between the two religious traditions and theologies in Germany and beyond.1 Yet questions of religious education do not automatically include an anthropological perspective, at least not explicitly. While one could argue very well that education is always based on certain anthropological views, current discussions in general education and religious education often tend to be limited in their awareness of this presupposition, with anthropological questions in education being treated by a small number of specialists. It is against this background that the topic of the anthropology of the child is addressed in the present contribution, in order to make this topic more visible in the discussion and to clarify why this might be important beyond (religious) education as well. Beyond such general considerations, a number of more specific reasons speak for addressing this topic. First, if it is true that this topic has been widely absent from Christian-Muslim dialogue, this absence can be seen as further contributing to today’s widespread understandings of education which are exclusively driven by, for example, one-sided economic interests. Second, any kind of religious education must be guided by the best interests of children which, from the point of view developed in this essay, includes doing justice to them, anthropologically. This leads on to a third point referring to theology itself. Theological anthropology remains incomplete and abstract as long as it does 1 The respective literature testifying to this has abounded in the last few years in Germany and beyond, so that it does not make sense to quote specific publications here. Most, if not all of the professors of Islamic Religious Education in Germany and Austria have been part of respective initiatives which makes it easy to trace respective publications. Personally, I would like to thank my Tübingen colleague from the Center of Islamic Theology, Professor Fahimah Ulfat, for her insights concerning the anthropology of the child in Islam which she generously shared with me for the purposes of this essay.

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not include a clear awareness of the difference between children and adults, as well as of the special dignity of childhood. Fourth but not last, as I will try to show in the following, taking up questions of the anthropology of the child can be helpful in Christian-Muslim dialogue, because such questions shed light on a number of important theological commonalities and differences. This is why the main question in the following will be on what impulses the anthropology of the child actually holds for theological anthropology and interreligious dialogue. In stating these intentions, we must begin with the question of what the concept of the anthropology of the child may actually mean. Does it refer to more than the attempt of extending theological anthropology to children, for example, by applying general anthropological categories to them? This question has in fact been the object of prolonged debates, in general education as well as in Christian – especially Protestant – religious education.2 To achieve clarity about the meaning of the anthropology of the child must then be our starting point.

Anthropology of the Child: Its Meaning and Purposes What is the difference between the anthropology of the child and general research on children, for example, about growing up in different religious or cultural contexts or the history of childhood in such contexts? Most of all, the distinctive characteristic of this anthropology arises from the understanding of anthropology in a philosophical or theological perspective. The question then is not, as in some understandings of cultural anthropology, about the actual forms of life found in different cultures which can be traced empirically, but rather about the understanding of the human being or of children as ‘human beings’.3 Understanding what it means that children are in fact fully human beings and understanding what it means for anthropology in general that all human beings are born as infants and later become children is the general task of the anthropology of the child. Yet of course, this first attempt at rendering the specific perspective of the anthropology of the child is in need of further explanation and refinement as can best be seen from earlier discussions. The endeavour of setting forth an explicit anthropology of the child first of all goes back to the new interest in anthropology in the philosophy and theology 2  In addition to the respective titles below, see a summary description of this discussion in Friedrich Schweitzer, Die Religion des Kindes. Zur Problemgeschichte einer religionspädagogischen Grundfrage, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1992, pp. 395–400. For the current discussion in religious education, see Thomas Schlag and Henrik Simojoki (eds.), Mensch – Religion – Bildung. Religionspädagogik in anthropologischen Spanungsfeldern, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2014. 3  In the recent discussion, the distinction is less clear-cut, because, among other reasons, educational anthropology has taken a turn towards historical anthropology. See Christoph Wulf, Anthropologie. Geschichte, Kultur, Philosophie, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004.

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of the early and mid-twentieth century. It can thus be understood as part of the interest in finding new answers to old questions concerning the decisive characteristics of human beings. Moreover, it can be viewed as an effort to make use of new insights from philosophical and theological anthropology for gaining a different, i. e. anthropological, understanding of both education and the child. To develop an anthropological understanding of education and the child was a main interest, for example, of the philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow.4 Yet making use of anthropology for education is only one of the possibilities for approaching the anthropology of the child. Other authors from the philosophy of education, such as Martinus Langeveld and Andreas Flitner, were more interested in making sure that children and childhood would be respected in their own right which, according to these philosophers, would exclude the attempt to view children and childhood exclusively from the perspective of adulthood.5 Children should not be viewed as small adults, but should be understood by their own ways of being in the world. It is this understanding which characterises the anthropology of the child in the perspective of education, not as an application of anthropology in general, but as an anthropology in its own right. The educational interpretation of the anthropology of the child also holds the potential of challenging widespread anthropological theories, be they in philosophy or in theology. In fact, it can be said that the concept of an anthropology of the child was introduced as part of the critical assessment of traditional anthropology.6 Traditional anthropology had its focus on ‘man’, later on ‘modern man’ and then on ‘men and women’. Yet even this broader focus remains abstract as long as it does not make special reference to the fact that anthropology is incomplete as long as it only studies adults. The ensuing question is what does ‘being a child’ tell us about the meaning of ‘being human’? Can the human being be adequately understood without making reference to the experiences of children? No anthropology can claim to be comprehensive as long as it is not willing to make special reference to such questions  – a critical point which clearly preluded later criticisms, for example, concerning gender or race but also, for example, other age-groups or minorities in anthropology. In other words, the anthropology of the child adds to general anthropology through the specific inquiry of what it means that all humans start out as children. From this 4  Cf. Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Die anthropologische Betrachtungsweise in der Pädagogik, Essen: Neue Deutsche Schule, 1965. 5 Cf. Martinus J. Langeveld, “Was hat die Anthropologie des Kindes dem Theologen zu sagen?”, Untersuchungen zur Anthropologie des Kindes, ed. Hermann Diem and Martinus J. Langeveld, Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1960, pp. 19–33; Andreas Flitner, “Pädagogische Anthropologie inmitten der Wissenschaften vom Menschen”, Wege zur pädagogischen Anthropologie. Versuch einer Zusammenarbeit der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, ed. Andreas Flitner et al., Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1963, pp. 218–68. 6  For a helpful overview, see Hans Scheuerl, Pädagogische Anthropologie. Eine historische Einführung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.

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perspective, being a child is an indispensable and also unavoidable part of being human and must be accounted for in anthropological interpretations. Childhood does not lose its anthropological meaning because, sooner or later, everybody leaves it behind. At least in a certain sense, all humans are permanently influenced by their childhood experiences. And that humans are not born as adults remains as characteristic of this species as other features which have been quoted in this context on a regular basis, for example, human capacities for reason or for standing and walking in an upright manner. More concretely, the anthropology of the child also aims at identifying general characteristics of childhood, for example, in terms of children’s special ways of experiencing space and time. Such an anthropology can yield, among other things, a richer understanding of human experience. As will become clear below, this understanding also includes children’s religion or faith. Not only being a child as such deserves to be respected but also children’s special ways of relating to God and of believing in God. For this reason, the development of an anthropology of the child has also led to critical debates concerning theologies which were not mindful of the special dignity of the religion of the child.7 For similar reasons, Protestant religious education has been accused of a ‘denial of the child’ as long as it insisted on interpreting the Christian faith exclusively in terms of understandings based on ‘adults’ – a criticism which applied most clearly to Protestant theologians in the middle of the twentieth century.8 In this respect, interest in the anthropology of the child also intersects with children’s rights’ approaches advocating children’s dignity and arguing for child’s right to be respected, as for example, Janusz Korcak, one of the leading authors in this field, put it.9 The intersection between the anthropology of the child and approaches to children’s rights also becomes visible in additional respects, most of all concerning religion and religious education in childhood. Can the meaning of being a child be grasped without taking account of the special ways of children relating to faith and religion? Does ‘religion’, or within a more contemporary framing ‘spirituality’, belong to childhood as such – as one of children’s ways of being in the world – or should it be considered a contingent addition which only comes into play with the external influences of parents and religious institutions? Vis-à-vis the tendency especially in contemporary philosophy of education to neglect religious questions altogether, it becomes an important interdisciplinary task for theology and religious education to show that any anthropology of the child without religion is inadequate and that the religious or spiritual dimension  See, for example, Martinus J. Langeveld, Anthropologie des Kindes. Werner Loch, Die Verleugnung des Kindes in der Evangelischen Pädagogik. Zur Aufgabe einer empirischen Anthropologie des kindlichen und jugendlichen Glaubens, Essen: Neue Deutsche Schule, 1964. 9  Cf. Janusz Korcak, Das Recht des Kindes auf Achtung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. 7

8 Cf.

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is not just accidental in childhood or in education. Finally, it is easy to see that an anthropology of the child can have direct practical implications as well. Different anthropologies explicitly or implicitly shape our ways of viewing children and therefore, they also shape our ways of actually treating children. In this respect, the anthropology of the child is key to understanding the deep structures of the practice of education. In sum, the discussion on the anthropology of the child has its origins in general debates about anthropology and education, including religious education. Interreligious questions have not played a role in such anthropology so far. Yet, since educational institutions like kindergartens or schools and especially religious education have become main fields of interreligious encounter and interreligious learning, it makes sense to include the anthropology of the child in the academic discourse on anthropology as an interreligious perspective. Moreover, this anthropology promises new impulses and insights for anthropology in general as well.

Anthropology of the Child in Christianity and in Islam Anthropological questions concerning the child have been an integral part of the Christian tradition. This is not to say that the actual concept of the anthropology of the child would have been used in Christian theology before the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the questions treated later on by the explicit anthropology of the child clearly have been present from early on.10 In Protestant theology, for example, for which I can speak, a special interest in the existence of the child can in fact be observed from the beginning. Martin Luther’s views on children point in two very different directions.11 On the one hand, he praised children’s openness towards God and faith, using them as a core image for illustrating his teaching of justification by faith. He was convinced that children could be true models for adults in this respect.12 On the other hand, Luther could be very stern with children, including almost unrestrained corporal punishment, because he was afraid of malignant sinful tendencies breaking out, for example, in the shape of children’s disobedience towards their parents. Yet even if Luther’s views of the child appear somewhat ambivalent and even given his appreciation for what must be considered, from today’s perspective, most doubtful forms of punishment, there can be no doubt about his interest in in10 Cf.

Schweitzer, Die Religion.  Cf. Ibid., pp. 31–69; Friedrich Schweitzer, Das Bildungserbe der Reformation. Bleibender Gehalt, Herausforderungen, Zukunftsperspektiven, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2016. 12  Luther does not use the term model but says that adults have to become children again; cf. Schweitzer, Die Religion, p. 48. 11

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cluding being a child with his general understanding of the human being.13 Later, Friedrich Schleiermacher, to mention another major figure from the Protestant tradition, argued in his Speeches on Religion from 1799 that children deserve utmost respect from adults and that their religious questions and interest should be carefully supported by sensitive educators.14 For Schleiermacher, children’s religious development was an indispensable dimension of their existence as human beings and therefore, an anthropological presupposition to be addressed in all education. From this perspective, he set forth a devastating critique of the Enlightenment which, especially with its philosophy of education, supported one-sided utilitarian understandings of education and children. Alternatively, Schleiermacher claims that every child is born with religious potential and would be able to develop religiously if there were no external restraints on his or her development. In this respect, he was followed by the romanticist philosopher Jean Paul who, in his Levana, published in 1807, did not only advocate religious education in childhood but also viewed childhood as the prime time for religious life in a human being.15 Luther’s and Schleiermacher’s views of the child and of religious education in childhood have remained of crucial importance for the anthropology of the child right up until today. Yet it is also important to consider the Biblical roots of their views. These roots of the Christian interest in children as well as in theological and anthropological views of the child can be found most of all in the New Testament. The Gospel of Mark reports two important situations in which Jesus makes special reference to children and childhood: He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’ (Mark 9:36–37)

In this passage, adults are obliged to encounter children with special care and appreciation  – an appreciation which was not at all common in antiquity.16 What is even more important, however, is the reason for this obligation stated by Jesus. He makes a direct link between people welcoming children and people welcoming himself which implies that he identifies with the children which, taken symbolically, creates a lasting connection between Christianity and chil13  It should also be added that many of his ideas about children developed in the context of the divisive debates on infant baptism at the time of the Reformation. Since Luther was convinced that there were no good theological reasons against infant baptism, he found himself obliged to explain his views of children’s capacity for faith or religion; cf. ibid., pp. 45–55, 59–61. 14  Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), ed. Rudolf Otto, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967, Third Speech. 15  Cf. Jean Paul, “Levana oder Erziehlehre”, Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller vol. 5, Munich: Hanser, 1967, pp. 515–874, 582 f. 16  Cf. Peter Müller, In der Mitte der Gemeinde. Kinder im Neuen Testament, NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 1992.

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dren. Moreover, his identification with children is paralleled by his identification with God. Consequently, serving children means serving God. Theology as the understanding of God, the understanding of Christ and the anthropology of the child are then strongly interconnected. The second passage which is of no less interest in terms of anthropology states that: People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. (Mark 10:13–16)

Again, there is the special appreciation with which Jesus encounters children – an appreciation which obviously even his disciples find hard to understand. In addition, Jesus offers an explanation which goes way beyond this limited encounter and which has a general theological and anthropological meaning, namely, to ‘receive the kingdom of God like a little child’. There is no further explanation in this passage from Mark for how this should be understood. In fact, later interpreters have often drawn on their own understandings of children in order to explain what Jesus might have meant, for example, the innocence or humility of a child.17 Yet none of these interpretations have a clear basis in the New Testament and they tell us more about the interpreters than the text. An example from the Gospel of Matthew may be understood to give another interpretation of the quote. Matthew gives this statement a slightly different turn, making children models for adults: He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matthew 18:2–3)

This view is quite challenging for adults who are told to ‘become like little children’. Furthermore, it also entails a challenge for any Christian anthropology which privileges the adult as an exclusive normative ideal. Again, the anthropology of the child assumes a critical function vis-à-vis distorted and distorting anthropologies in that it makes the one-sided perspective of such normative ideals visible. The Biblical references quoted above continue to play a major role in the Christian tradition18 and are fundamental to any Christian understanding of the child. For example, Mark 10 is often read at baptisms, whereas Mark 9 is quoted in the context of diaconal work with children. Both quotes also play a major role for Christian religious education by obliging it to a special commitment to children and warning it against a one-sided interpretation of the relationship 17 Cf.

Schweitzer, Die Religion, pp. 405–13.  Cf. The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Martha Bunge, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2001.

18

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between children and adults. However, this is not to say that this tradition has always followed the model of Jesus in this respect, as accounts on the history of childhood sadly show.19 It was surprising for me that I could not find real parallels for the Christian interest in the anthropology of the child in Islamic literature, at least as far as the religious education discussion in western countries is concerned.20 Altogether, the extant work tends to follow less a philosophical or theological interest but has its focus on perspectives of cultural anthropology and on forms of life in different countries or cultures. Moreover, of the limited research on this topic Avner Gilʿadi’s Children of Islam pursues, for example, specific topics concerning childhood, for example, rituals to be carried out with children or health-related questions.21 More recent studies also do not include anthropological perspectives but are more interested in empirical findings on raising children in different Muslim countries and settings, like the fascinating collection of studies Children in the Muslim Middle East edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea or a number of studies from African countries.22 Such studies are certainly interesting, as contributions on research of children and childhood as well as demonstrations of the many different forms that Muslim children’s lives can assume in different countries and in different cultures. The empirical research on Muslim children and religious education in Germany can also be seen in this connection.23 Yet as mentioned in the beginning of this essay, educational as well as psychological and sociological studies do not necessarily address anthropological questions, 19  For the clearest account in this respect, see Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood, New York NY: Psychohistory Pr., 1974. 20  Recently, this picture seems to change at least to some degree; see, for example, Zekirija Sejdini, „Zwischen Gewissheit und Kontingenz. Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Verständnis von islamischer Theologie und Religionspädagogik im europäischen Kontext“, Islamische Theologie und Religionspädagogik in Bewegung. Neue Ansätze in Europa, ed. Zekirija Sejdini, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016, pp. 15–31 who makes anthropology his starting point (p. 20); also see the literature in the following. 21  Avner Gilʿadi, Children of Islam. Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society, Oxford: Macmillan, 1992. The author considers his work a first step towards a history of childhood in Islam, see pp. IX–XI. For a more recent statement by this author, see Avner Gilʿadi, “The Nurture and Protection of Children in Islam. Perspectives from Islamic Sources”, Child Abuse & Neglect, 38 (2014), pp. 585–92. 22  Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (ed.), Children in the Muslim Middle East, Austin TX: University of Texas Pr., 1995; Danile M. M’Mutungi, Childhood Education in Islam and Christianity. A Comparative Study, Central Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010 (from Kenya); Hasina Banu Ebrahim, Early Childhood Education for Muslim Children. Rationales and Practices in South Africa, London: Routledge, 2016. 23 Cf. the research report by Fahimah Ulfat, “Current State of Research on Islamic Religious Education in Germany”, Researching Religious Education. Classroom Processes and Outcomes, ed. Friedrich Schweitzer and Reinhold Boschki, Münster: Waxmann, 2018, pp. 343–72; also see Aladin El-Mafaalani and Ahmet Toprak, Muslimische Kinder und Jugendliche in Deutschland. Lebenswelten – Denkmuster – Herausforderungen, Sankt Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2011.

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even if such studies could well be interpreted via an anthropological perspective. One of the very few exceptions to this general picture to be found in the literature on Muslim children has been the German philosopher of Muslim religious education Harry Harun Behr. Yet it is probably no coincidence that his recent article on “Islamic Views of the Human Being” comes from the context of Christian-Muslim dialogue.24 The same is true for other contributions which are of interest in the present context and which are connected to the Emory-based project on the “Child in Law, Religion, and Society” in the United States  – a project which started out, among others, from Christian theology25 – or to interreligious dialogue organised by religious educators from Judaism, Christianity and Islam.26 This observation may raise the question of whether an anthropology of the child could be carried out as a genuine Muslim endeavour or if it would remain a typically Christian idea more or less artificially grafted upon Islam from without. At least some Muslim theologians like Behr, however, show themselves convinced that it would indeed be possible as well as desirable for Islamic theology to write its own anthropology of the child – an assumption which is encouraging for the present article’s plea for including the anthropology of the child in ChristianMuslim dialogue. As a starting point, Behr offers a number of statements which he considers foundations of an Islamic anthropology of the child: ‘Children have the potential of religious development and knowing’ ‘Children are able to verbally express themselves religiously’ ‘Children are capable of religious relationships’ ‘Children are able to act religiously’.27

Such statements can be an interesting beginning for interreligious comparison and dialogue. From a Christian point of view, however, the question of the anthropology of the child could lead even deeper into theological questions, 24  Cf. Harry Harun Behr, “Menschenbilder im Islam”, Handbuch Christentum und Islam in Deutschland. Grundlagen, Erfahrungen und Perspektiven des Zusammenlebens, vol. 1, ed. Mathias Rohe et al., Freiburg: Herder, 2014, pp. 489–529. 25  Cf. the respective chapters on the child in Islam in Don S. Browning and Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore (eds.), Children and Childhood in American Religions, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009 and Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. In the German discussion, perspectives from this American discussion are taken up by Tuba Isik-Yigit and Muna Tatari, “Kindheitskonzepte in islamischer Perspektive. Ein Streifzug”, Religionssensible Schulkultur, ed. Gudrun Guttenberger and Harald Schroeter-Witke, Jena: IKS Garamond, 2011, pp. 233–42. 26  Cf. Katja Boehme (ed.), “Wer ist der Mensch?” Anthropologie im interreligiösen Lernen und Lehren, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013. 27  Behr, Menschenbilder, pp. 504–8 (Behr uses these statements as headlines for explanatory paragraphs).

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because the child plays a core role for the deep structures of Christian theology. By this I refer to the understanding of incarnation which, at least sometimes, has been understood explicitly as God becoming human in an infant. This core Christian belief can hardly be without consequences for both, the Christian understanding of God and the Christian anthropology of the child. Moreover, this raises interesting questions for interreligious dialogue. What can be said about a Christian anthropology of the child presupposing this understanding of incarnation as compared to an Islamic anthropology of the child without the idea of incarnation? Does the idea of incarnation really make a difference in terms of the anthropology of the child? And if so, what would this difference imply concerning Christian and Muslim views of education as well as the ChristianMuslim dialogue concerning the understanding of both the child and education? How will different anthropologies affect possible cooperation in the field of education? Clearly, these questions could serve as the starting point for a prolonged conversation about the deep structures of theology and anthropology. Moreover, in today’s Christian understanding, human likeness to God is a decisive presupposition for education as well as for viewing the child.28 The understanding that the child has to be treated and respected as an image of God includes an individualising effect, at least according to the Christian tradition. In this perspective, the child’s dignity is not dependent on his or her belonging to a social body, be it the family or a nation, and also not the child’s belonging to a religious tradition or community. As images of God children possess an inherent dignity and inherent rights. Again, interesting comparative questions can ensue from this understanding. The concept of the human likeness to God has clear Biblical roots (Genesis 1:27) while the Qur’an does not include such a concept. How can the dignity of the child be secured in Islam without a Qur’anic basis comparable to the Biblical reference to the human as an image of God?29 What other theological arguments, for example, drawing on the theology of creation can play a role in this respect and in which sense? What does this imply for the Christian view of the child? How influential is the view of the child as the image of God if there are alternative possibilities for finding a basis for the inherent dignity of the child? 28  Cf. Friedrich Schweitzer, Menschenwürde und Bildung. Religiöse Voraussetzungen der Pädagogik in evangelischer Perspektive, Zurich: TVZ, 2011; Friedrich Schweitzer, “Human Dignity and Education. A Protestant View”, HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 72 (2016) (Online). 29 Commenting on this essay, my Tübingen colleague Professor Lejla Demiri pointed out that according to a famous prophetic report (hadith), ‘God created Adam in His image’, which would imply that there could be more commonalities between the two traditions than is commonly assumed. Demiri refers to Abraham’s Children. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation, ed. Norman Solomon, Richard Harries and Tim Winter, London: T&T Clark, 2006, pp. 147–79 (especially pp. 163–74).

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The Anthropology of the Child and Contemporary Issues in (Religious) Education In the context of religious education people often pose the question of whether a certain academic discourse is of any practical concern or relevance. This is why I want to devote the last section of this essay to possible practical consequences which could be treated in more detail in future joint Christian-Muslim research on the anthropology of the child. For reasons of space, I limit myself to two examples: First, the religious status of children within the church and within the Muslim community: For most of history, the religious status of children was considered as a special status of limited rights within the Christian tradition. What was discussed above about the implications of the concepts of incarnation and of the human’s likeness to God should not be understood to mean that the actual treatment of children followed the premises defined by these concepts. Often the contrary was true, as is known from general studies in the history of childhood which describe many forms of child abuse.30 Yet while such studies usually show no special connection between the subordinate position of children and religion, there also are specific examples of how children’s dignity was not respected – or even perceived – in Christianity.31 Most of all, it must be mentioned in this context that children were not admitted to the Eucharist  – according to the Protestant understanding, one of the two Christian sacraments. In the Protestant Church in Germany this practice of not admitting children to the Eucharist was upheld until about two or three decades ago.32 Considerations concerning the immaturity of children and their limited understanding of the meaning of the Eucharist prevented the church from realising that it could hardly make sense to set up rules on preconditions of religious admittance without violating Christian principles. Only recently has the church found its way to consider infant baptism as a sole condition of church membership, not in a partial, but in a full sense of the rights of participation and admittance, including the Eucharist, and that the only legitimate limits to this general understanding must be based on considerations concerning the best interests of the child.33 It may be assumed that children’s status within religious communities is also related to gender issues. How  Cf. deMause, History. overviews, see Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought; Schweitzer, Die Religion. 32 Cf. Eberhard Kenntner, Abendmahl mit Kindern. Versuch einer Grundlegung unter Berücksichtigung der geschichtlichen Wurzeln der gegenwärtigen Diskussion in Deutschland, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1980. 33  I am not aware of parallel discourses in Islamic theology concerning, for example, children’s participation in certain rites or concerning their position and status within the Muslim community. It would therefore be interesting and necessary to explore Islamic views of the religious status of children in comparison to the Christian tradition. 30

31 For

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should a theological anthropology of the child address this question? Is there a need to change the anthropology of the child into an anthropology of boys and an anthropology of girls? And if so, with what implications and practical consequences? Second, Children’s Rights: The formulation and acceptance of children’s rights has been a hallmark of the twentieth century. The first declaration of children’s rights came from the League of Nations in 1924, in the shape of the now famous Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. In general, however, the 1989 United Nations’ Convention on Children’s Rights is considered the major declaration and historic achievement in this context.34 This declaration has been welcomed by the churches, among others, in Germany. There also have been several Muslim declarations on children’s rights, for example the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam from 2005.35 This declaration clearly follows the United Nations’ lead but it is also premised on the need to adapt to Islam what the authors obviously consider the Western views embodied in the United Nations’ Declaration. Again, this raises the question of what kind of – possibly tacit – anthropologies the different declarations on children’s rights are premised upon, how these anthropologies compare theologically and how they should be evaluated from a theological perspective. Moreover, a special question which is of interest in the present context, refers to children’s religious rights.36 The question of whether children can enjoy the right of religious freedom themselves or if their freedom should rather be considered as included in their parents’ freedom of religion, has been hotly debated, among others, with respect to the United Nations’ 1989 Convention.37 In my own work, the issue of children’s right to religion and religious education has been central. This right is clearly premised on anthropological assumptions in that it is argued that children do in fact have spiritual rights of their own, vis-à-vis their parents as well as society and the state – a view which, interestingly, was clearly included in the first declaration on children’s rights in 1924 but since has been more or less forgotten. Even the 1989 United Nations’ Covenant is rather vague in this respect, especially once it comes to questions of entitlement such as children’s right to have access to religious education.38 In any case, declarations of 34 For background information, see Gabriele Dorsch, Die Konvention der Vereinten Nationen über die Rechte des Kindes, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1994. 35  https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/44eaf0e4a.pdf (accessed 12 September 2018). 36 Cf. Friedrich Schweitzer, Das Recht des Kindes auf Religion, new ed., Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013. 37 Cf. Dorsch, Konvention. 38 Cf. my articles: “Children’s Right to Religion and Spirituality. Legal, Educational and Practical Perspectives”, British Journal of Religious Education, 27 (2005), pp. 103–13; “The Child’s Right to Religion. Religious Education as a Human Right?”, Human Rights and Religion in Educational Contexts, ed. Manfred L. Pirner, Johannes Lähnemann and Heiner Bielefeldt, Zurich: Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 161–70; “Children’s Right to Religion in

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children’s rights are highly expressive of underlying anthropological views. They can be read as practical versions of such anthropologies and therefore they also deserve the continued attention of theological anthropology. In sum, it seems obvious that discussing the anthropology of the child is far from being a topic of academic interest alone. Instead, this anthropology entails many practical implications while societies’ as well as the religions’ ways of treating children are following anthropological assumptions based on religious beliefs, be it explicitly or implicitly. Since such assumptions are not always beneficial, even if they claim to be based on sound theological reasons, there is a need for critically assessing them, not least from a theological perspective.

Conclusion This essay attempted to answer the question of whether it makes sense to include the anthropology of the child in the endeavour of an interreligious dialogue on theological anthropology. At the end of the essay it can be stated that this indeed holds a great possibility for future discourse. In reference to the child, for example, this can broaden the anthropological discourse by adding a more diverse and nuanced understanding of human existence which is sensitive for different ages and, as a consequence, also for other distinctions like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. The anthropology of the child implies a number of questions concerning the basis of theology’s views of the child in particular and of the human being in general, as well as concerning the theological presuppositions of such views in Christianity on the one hand and in Islam on the other (presuppositions which have not received the attention they deserve, especially not in interreligious dialogue). Finally, discussions on the anthropology of the child also include important practical implications which demonstrate, in an exemplary manner, that interreligious dialogue on anthropology should be of current interest beyond the academy. As an educator, I would also add that it is the children themselves who may benefit from a theological anthropology which is sensitive to their special experiences and which is serious about their status as human beings, within the religious communities as well as in society at large. Including the anthropology of the child in Christian-Muslim dialogue can contribute to a stronger awareness of the always vulnerable existence of children which so often is overlooked and bypassed in favour of topics considered more pressing and more important.

Educational Perspective”, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood, ed. Anna Strhan, Stephen G. Parker and Susan B. Ridgely, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 181–9.

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Bibliography Banu Ebrahim, Hasina, Early Childhood Education for Muslim Children. Rationales and Practices in South Africa, London: Routledge, 2016. Behr, Harry Harun, “Menschenbilder im Islam”, Handbuch Christentum und Islam in Deutschland. Grundlagen, Erfahrungen und Perspektiven des Zusammenlebens, vol. 1, ed. Mathias Rohe et al., Freiburg: Herder, 2014, pp. 489–529. Boehme, Katja (ed.), “Wer ist der Mensch?” Anthropologie im interreligiösen Lernen und Lehren, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013. Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, Die anthropologische Betrachtungsweise in der Pädagogik, Essen: Neue Deutsche Schule, 1965. Browning, Don S. and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (eds.), Children and Childhood in American Religions, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Bunge, Martha (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2001. Bunge, Marcia J. (ed.), Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. deMause, Lloyd, The History of Childhood, New York NY: Psychohistory Pr., 1974. Dorsch, Gabriele, Die Konvention der Vereinten Nationen über die Rechte des Kindes, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1994. El-Mafaalani, Aladin and Ahmet Toprak, Muslimische Kinder und Jugendliche in Deutschland. Lebenswelten  – Denkmuster  – Herausforderungen, Sankt Augustin and Berlin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2011. Flitner, Andreas, “Pädagogische Anthropologie inmitten der Wissenschaften vom Menschen”, Wege zur pädagogischen Anthropologie. Versuch einer Zusammenarbeit der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, ed. Andreas Flitner et al., Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1963, pp. 218–68. Gilʿadi, Avner, Children of Islam. Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society, Oxford: Macmillan, 1992. Gilʿadi, Avner, “The Nurture and Protection of Children in Islam. Perspectives from Islamic Sources”, Child Abuse & Neglect, 38 (2014), pp. 585–92. Isik-Yigit, Tuba and Muna Tatari, “Kindheitskonzepte in islamischer Perspektive. Ein Streifzug”, Religionssensible Schulkultur, ed. Gudrun Guttenberger and Harald Schroeter-Witke, Jena: IKS Garamond, 2011, pp. 233–42. Kenntner, Eberhard, Abendmahl mit Kindern. Versuch einer Grundlegung unter Berücksichtigung der geschichtlichen Wurzeln der gegenwärtigen Diskussion in Deutschland, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1980. Korcak, Janusz, Das Recht des Kindes auf Achtung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. Langeveld, Martinus J., “Was hat die Anthropologie des Kindes dem Theologen zu sagen?”, Untersuchungen zur Anthropologie des Kindes, ed. Hermann Diem and Martinus J. Langeveld, Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1960, pp. 19–33. Loch, Werner, Die Verleugnung des Kindes in der Evangelischen Pädagogik. Zur Aufgabe einer empirischen Anthropologie des kindlichen und jugendlichen Glaubens, Essen: Neue Deutsche Schule, 1964. M’Mutungi, Danile M., Childhood Education in Islam and Christianity. A Comparative Study, Central Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010.

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Müller, Peter, In der Mitte der Gemeinde. Kinder im Neuen Testament, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1992. Paul, Jean, “Levana oder Erziehlehre”, Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller vol. 5, Munich: Hanser, 1967, pp. 515–874. Scheuerl, Hans, Pädagogische Anthropologie. Eine historische Einführung, Stuttgart: Kohl­ hammer, 1982. Schlag, Thomas and Henrik Simojoki (eds.), Mensch – Religion – Bildung. Religionspädagogik in anthropologischen Spanungsfeldern, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2014. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), ed. Rudolf Otto, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967. Schweitzer, Friedrich, Die Religion des Kindes. Zur Problemgeschichte einer religionspädagogischen Grundfrage, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1992. Schweitzer, Friedrich, “Children’s Right to Religion and Spirituality. Legal, Educational and Practical Perspectives”, British Journal of Religious Education, 27 (2005), pp. 103–13. Schweitzer, Friedrich, Menschenwürde und Bildung. Religiöse Voraussetzungen der Pädagogik in evangelischer Perspektive, Zurich: TVZ, 2011. Schweitzer, Friedrich, Das Recht des Kindes auf Religion, new ed., Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013. Schweitzer, Friedrich, “Human Dignity and Education. A Protestant View”, HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 72 (2016) (online). Schweitzer, Friedrich, “The Child’s Right to Religion. Religious Education as a Human Right?”, Human Rights and Religion in Educational Contexts, ed. Manfred L. Pirner, Johannes Lähnemann and Heiner Bielefeldt, Zurich: Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 161–70. Schweitzer, Friedrich, Das Bildungserbe der Reformation. Bleibender Gehalt, Herausforderungen, Zukunftsperspektiven, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2016. Schweitzer, Friedrich, “Children’s Right to Religion in Educational Perspective”, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood, ed. Anna Strhan, Stephen G. Parker and Susan B. Ridgely, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 181–9. Sejdini, Zekirija, “Zwischen Gewissheit und Kontingenz. Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Verständnis von islamischer Theologie und Religionspädagogik im europäischen Kontext”, Islamische Theologie und Religionspädagogik in Bewegung. Neue Ansätze in Europa, ed. Zekirija Sejdini, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016, pp. 15–31. Solomon, Norman, Richard Harries and Tim Winter (eds.), Abraham’s Children. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation, London: T&T Clark, 2006. Ulfat, Fahimah, “Current State of Research on Islamic Religious Education in Germany”, Researching Religious Education. Classroom Processes and Outcomes, ed. Friedrich Schweitzer and Reinhold Boschki, Münster: Waxmann, 2018, pp. 343–72. Warnock Fernea, Elizabeth (ed.), Children in the Muslim Middle East, Austin TX: University of Texas Pr., 1995. Wulf, Christoph, Anthropologie. Geschichte, Kultur, Philosophie, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004.

Children in the Medieval Islamic Imagination A Path Towards Pedagogic Dialogue Mujadad Zaman ‘To know oneself is to know God’ says a commonly cited hadith.1 The harmony of its meaning attends to the homology between the self and the Divine, since the self is touched by the mysterium of eternity within the heart, the Keep of the soul. And yet to ask ‘what a piece of work is a man’2 remains the preoccupation defining us as a species and our endeavours since its complexities are ever emergent, pentimento-like, in the long story of humanity. Moreover, the child, as an archetype of the human personality, argues the psychologist Carl Jung, inheres those possibilities which move beyond childhood and are present in all phases of life.3 To apprehend these intricacies, the child stands as a natural first point of cogitation upon life’s great journey i. e. ‘to know oneself ’, and no little thought has been expended in understanding its subtle significance in medieval Islamic thought.4 As a theological reflection upon anthropology, the nature, role and meaning of childhood which occupies the academic literature more recently has yet to make good on its interpolation with an understanding of Islamic thought more broadly. In this essay our intention is to address this matter by locating the varying ways in which the concept of the child and her nurturing have been conceived and actualised for interfaith purposes. It will be argued that derived from the scriptural, religious and other resources there is a consistent and penetrating 1 This hadith is itself not considered an authenticated prophetic narration though it is present in a number of sufi texts. See ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān b. ʿAlī al-Jullābī al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-Mahjub (The Revelation of the Veiled), an early Persian Treatise on Sufism, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2000, pp. 179–82. 2  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, London: Penguin Classics, 2015, 2.2.301–302. 3  As an archetype the child can appear throughout life, for Jung, as the puer aeternus (eternal child) which is symptomatic of a stunted psyche. Within the Biblical domain of this particular child reference, see Job 3:3: ‘There is a man child conceived’. For the lapse into childhood in older age and as a trope in literature, see Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the lugubriousness of Jacques’ diatribe of the ‘second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, London: Penguin Classics, 2015, 2.7.139, italics added. 4  Hasan Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon. Youth versus Old Age in Medieval Arabic Literature, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 1–24.

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treatment of the child as theologically referenced, anthropologically unique and pedagogically captivating to Islamicate civilisation.

Qur’anic Topoi of the Child The initial difficulty of expositing a ‘Qur’anic vision’ of the child is that it countervails the varying and indispensably interconnected gestalt of ideas which construct the vision of the scripture itself. To this end, speaking of the ‘Qur’anic conception of the child’ at times adumbrates its treatment of human collectives whilst at others addresses the child directly. The child is therefore a concatenation of views expressed within a larger treatment of humanity. This shifting momentum in the scripture may often result in a pastiche of disconnected vistas on the subject, if we do not hold a consummate vision of the text itself. Not to do so brings a potentially anaemic response to the question of what the Qur’an has to say about the child and children, as Toshihiko Izutsu argues in this regard: at first sight the task would appear to be quite a simple one. All we have to do, one might think, will be to pick up out of the whole vocabulary of the Qur’an all the important words that stand for important concepts […] and examine what they mean in the Qur’anic context. The matter, however, is not in reality so simple, for these words or concepts are not simply in the Qur’an, each standing in isolation from others, but they are closely interdependent and derive their concrete meanings precisely from the entire system of relations.5

Human beings are created ‘by diverse stages’ (Q 71:14),6 says the scripture, as Adam was ‘created in the image of God’,7 and the special regard given to humanity is no less evident in the manner of the Qur’an’s treatment of the child. This it achieves through the variation of nomenclature it employs in addressing them. A number of definitions for the child are given including ṭifl (infant),8 ṣabiyy (discerning child), walad (general term for child)9 and ghulām (young man), 5  Izutsu argues this in relationship to the semantics within the Qur’an, as particularly synchronic and diachronic usages, which lay within its nomenclatural domain. Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in The Koranic Weltanschauung, Tokyo: Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1964, p. 4, see also pp. 32–73; Angelika Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity. A Shared Heritage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 347–473. 6  Alluding to this verse, the Moroccan Sufi ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (d. 1132/1719) reflects on the manner by which the first human, Adam, was created by God through similar stages. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh, Pure Gold from the Words of Sayyidī ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh, trans. John O’Kane and Bernd Radtke, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 827–38. 7  Christopher Melchert, “God Created Adam in His Image”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 13 (2011), pp. 113–24, at pp. 114–7. 8  According to Lane this is ‘a child until he discriminates […] after which he is called ṣabiyy’. Edward William Lane, Arabic- English Lexicon, 2 vols.; a lithogr. repr. of the 1863 original, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 1477–8. 9  The term walad here includes both male and female. Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon, p. 203.

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fatā (a youth), banūn (male children), dhurriyya (offspring), yatīm (a fatherless child), etc.10 In this sense, the lengths the scripture employs to designate the varying categories of a child’s development, irrespective of religious or social affiliation, stands distinct in the Qur’an as in the Abrahamic traditions.11 In other words, and anthropologically speaking, the child is spoken of and differentiated amongst the great panoply of created beings. This treatment prefigures even birth through the instantiation of the soul in the womb. In light of this treatment there is the injunction against the grave sin (kabīra) of killing one’s children (Q 6:151; 60:12).12 As a unique feature in scriptural history, the Qur’an also provides a view of the unborn child giving careful attention to its stages of development which are exhibited as ‘signs of God.’13 The blessing of a child’s life is further enshrined in the sharīʿa and developed into legal edicts which not merely protect the life of the foetus, but add an indemnity to be paid for causing its unlawful abortion. Moreover, the foetus is given provision in the sacred law to receive an inheritance, a legacy and, if born into slave, to be manumitted.14 Of importance here is 10  For a greater treatment of the subject of the child within the Qur’an see Thomas J. O’Shaugh­nessy, “The Qurʾānic View of Youth and Old Age”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 141 (1991), pp. 33–51, at pp. 35–45. 11 This claim does not elide the treatment of the child given in the Bible per se, only that its manner contrasts with that of the Qur’an. For example, on the idea of the child in late Christian antiquity, see Blake Leyerle, “Children and ‘the Child’ in Early Christianity”, The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World, ed. Judith Evans Grubbs and Tim Parkin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 559–79; Marcia J. Bunge and John Wall, “Christianity”, Children and Childhood in World Religions. Primary Sources and Texts, ed. Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009, pp. 83–150. Within the Jewish legal tradition, for example, the child as minor ‘stand[s] merely for physically immature persons, and do[es] not stand for a class of individuals whose rights, duties, and responsibilities are different from those enjoyed by a grown-up person. These terms are never used in the Bible in connexion with phases of life that enter into the realm of law and responsibility. Quite in contrast […] in Talmudic literature, where it denotes legal and religious prematureness’. Israel Lebendiger, “The Minor in Jewish Law”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 6 (1916), pp. 459–93, at p. 459, fn. 1. 12  The nomenclatural range within the scripture designating infanticide as a grave sin is broad. Consider Q 17:33 and its reference to khaṭīʾa for the same act which coincides with the terms dhanb and ithm used elsewhere in the Qurʾan. Izutsu’s discussion of sayyiʾuhu (sodomy) shows the nomenclatural use of grave sins with the repugnant as an example of this sematic interpolation albeit one which is systematised. Of interest here is that many of these terms are used when dealing with the ill treatment of children. Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an, Montreal: McGill University Press, 1966, p. 229; John L. Esposito, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 138. 13  These terms are found in a number of places within the scripture (Q 22, 23 and 40). For example, they refer to foetal development as nuṭfa (drop of semen), ʿalaqa (a piece of clotted blood), muḍgha (a morsel of flesh), ʿiẓām (emergence of bones and limbs), kasāwa (clothed in flesh) and laḥm (flesh) (Q 23:12–14). 14  Harald Motzki, “Das Kind und seine Sozialisation in der islamischen Familie des Mittelalters”, Zur Sozialgeschihte der Kindheit, ed. Jochen Martin and August Nitschke, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1986, pp. 391–441, at pp. 409–10; Avner Gilʿadi, Children of Islam. Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992, pp. 8–10.

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also where such verses, dealing with the honouring of a child’s life, appear in the sequence of the revelation. There is a general consensus that they form part of the early ‘Meccan suras’, i. e. amongst the earliest revelations given to the Prophet and which subsequently share company with contemporaneous ones dealing with the fundamentals of belief, namely God’s Omnificence, conviction in the unseen, life after death, the Day of Resurrection, the prohibition of idolatry, and observing prayer, matters which ultimately establish the religion’s spiritual and moral foundations.15 With the various Qur’anic moral narratives, the child is often singled out for particular attention and spiritual instruction in reference to prophetic personages. For example, the oft-cited story of Moses and Khiḍr (Q 18:65–82) follows the instruction of Moses by the latter in the art of wisdom through three incidents, two of which deal specifically with children. Moreover there is Sura Luqmān (Q 31) whose namesake includes an exhortation to his son in pious reverence,16 and the nativity of Jesus followed by the babe addressing a congregation while still in the arms of his mother (Q 19:30–33). For the theologian and historian of childhood alike, these appearances within the scripture, of which this is a sampling, help foreground a view of the child as a concordant aspect and yet unique phase of life. In this regard, children stand very much in medias res of the revelatory story and the Muhammadan message, explicating the importance of children in the norms of life and Weltanschauung of medieval Islamic culture.

The Sunna and Children Details pertaining to the life of the Prophet are perhaps, of all premodern personages, the most well-known and documented.17 It is a life, in due measure of its relevance to world history, which uniquely captures a vibrancy and variance both beyond and within the domicile. Of all the varying manner of things mentioned in the historical sources, the volume of attention given to children and the comportment towards them rubricates a particular hue to the Sunna (the Prophet’s manner and custom) and one in which due regard and honour are 15 For an analysis of the chronology of these early Meccan suras and verses dealing with children, see O’Shaughnessy, The Qurʾānic View of Youth and Old Age, pp. 36–45. 16  These counsels to his son number ten in total in this sura (Q 31) and range the spectrum of belief and piety from theology to ethical comportment. These are, in order of verses, remonstrance to claiming parity with God (3); filial piety (4); God’s omniscience (16); establishment of prayer (17); availing oneself of righteousness (17); having patience (17); avoiding superciliousness (17); refraining from haughtiness (18); having due moderation (19) and speaking softly (19). 17  This is not without appreciation for the speculation and critique of the historical sources from which the life of the Prophet is constructed as well as being documented in the classical debates themselves. Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith. The Making of the Prophet of Islam, Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2020, pp. 1–24.

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held with primacy. Anas ibn Mālik, himself a young ward in the Prophetic household, relates an account that ‘an Anṣārī [Medinan] woman came to the Prophet in the company of her children, and the Prophet said to her, “By Him in Whose Hand my soul is, you are the most beloved people to me!” And he repeated the statement thrice.’18 Further examples include, though are not limited to, his interactions with children of all ages through his manner of conversation, play,19 showing them special regard,20 especially orphans (yatīm), as well as providing an example through his own children. In this latter regard, his daughter Fāṭima is known to have been the subject of special attention, since it was witnessed that if she were to enter a gathering, the Prophet would stand, take her hand to kiss it and then proceed to lead her by the hand, and have her sit where he had been.21 Moreover, there are cases of him presenting children with gifts, bestowing on them responsibility, dispensing advice and comporting to their emotional needs, etc. Such instances are made more pertinent since the Prophet is viewed both as an example and one whom the faithful are instructed to follow (ittibāʿ al-Nabī). ‘Say [O Muhammad]: If you love God, follow me and God will love you and forgive you your sins. God is Forgiving, Merciful’ (Q 3:31) says the Qur’an; and so following the Prophet, and concordantly imitating his manner towards children, is viewed as a religious duty to uphold, considered as part of īmān (faith), since intentions and actions are manifestations of piety. Accordingly, a hadith informs us that caring parents who in the middle of the night get up to warm their children with their own clothes are more virtuous than a knight engaged in battle for the sake of God.22 This treatment of the child extends, for example, even to the subtleties of reprimanding a child.23 In an oft-cited tradition from Anas ibn Mālik, who was 18 Bukhārī,

Ṣaḥīḥ, “al-Adab”, 640.

19 Al-Sayyid al-Ḥimyarī relates an oft-cited account of the Prophet playing with his grandsons

with them riding on his back. Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam. A Study in Cultural Orientation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 123. 20 In honouring the rights of children, Sahl ibn Saʿd al-Saʿīdī narrates a hadith in which the Prophet was offered a drink and upon his right was a child and an elderly man on his left. The custom being to start with the right, the Prophet asked the child ‘would you allow me to give these people to drink first?’ The child responded, ‘By God no. I would never give up my share from you for anyone else’. The Prophet smiled and gave the boy the drink’. Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, “Musqat”, 547. 21  Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, “al-Adab”, 5217. 22  Avner Gilʿadi, “Islam”, Children and Childhood in World Religions. Primary Sources and Texts, ed. Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, pp. 151–216, at p. 158. 23 The frequency with which the medieval educational speaks of the excesses of student physical and emotional reprimanding offers, perhaps, an insight into quotidian practices. See Ibn Saḥnūn’s (d. 245/870) pedagogic account of ‘what has been mentioned regarding discipline  – what is permissible and what is not’. Bradley J. Cook and Fathi H. Malkawi (eds.), Classical Foundations of Islamic Educational Thought, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 4–6. For the jurist Abū Ḥanīfa, the teacher who uses beating as an excuse to

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a young boy (ward) in the service of the Prophetic household, said: ‘I served the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, for ten years. By God, he never even said to me, “Uff !” He never spoke harshly to me or asked “Why did you do that?” or, “Why did you not do that?”.’24 The role of the child in the Sunna extends also to issues of mortality and bereavement, since the Prophet himself buried almost all of his children during his lifetime, being survived only by his daughter Fāṭima. In continuing the Qur’anic injunction on the Divine opprobrium caused by killing one’s progeny, and the noticeable absence of a purgatory theology, the Sunna states that a child who dies from natural causes is recompensed with heaven in the wardenship of Abraham the Patriarch (this being so whether the child had believing or non-believing parents).25 In all such cases, taken consummately and running coterminously with the scripture’s vision of the child’s sanctity, the Sunna mirrors the imperative that life unfolds in ‘stages’. Such attention arguably marks a contribution in world religion for its frequency and range in subject matter as well as foregrounding the expectations for thinking about children in later Islamic thought. This regard which occasions their treatment presents them as neither miniature adults nor indolent non-rational beings but marked as sui generis in the unfolding narrative of life.

Medicine and the Development of the Child Medieval Islamic thought on the child equally abuts the subject with a polyvalence which stresses the uniqueness of children. The first matter to be considered here is the religious encouragement to procreate and grow as a community of believers, mirroring the commandment in Genesis 1:28. Indeed their existential providence is noted by the medieval theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), for example, who cites that of the five predestined activities of one’s life, the second deals with the matter of having children.26 It is therefore in no small mention that we find Islamic culture as developing a distinctly positive and nurturing conception of the child, which can be surmised in the exercise of understanding their developmental, spiritual, emotional and educative needs. In paediatric literature, for example, following Hippocrates, childhood is disgive vent to his own rage ‘is liable for indemnity for bodily injury as well as repentance.’ Avner Gilʿadi, “Islam”, p. 201. 24  Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, “al-Ṭibb”, 5691. 25  There are a number of traditions relating the parental recompense for a child(s) death such as ‘a Muslim whose three children die before the age of puberty will be granted Paradise by God due to His mercy for them.’ Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, “Janāʾiz”, 1248. 26  Al-Ghazālī, Book of Counsel for Kings (Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk), trans. F. R. C. Bagley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 136.

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tinguished in periods of developments, each with corresponding virtues and entelechy. The noted physician Ibn al-Jazzār al-Qayrawānī (d. 370/980) whose Kitāb Siyāsat al-ṣibyān wa-tadbīrihim (‘The Book of Child-rearing’) exposits four periods of childhood. The first describes infancy proper from birth to dentition (sinn al-wildān); from dentition to the age of seven (sinn al-ṣibyān); the age of seven to fourteen (sinn ibn sabʿ sinīna) and finally the transition from childhood to puberty from the age of fourteen.27 Traditionally, the age of seven marks the onset of an acute period of discernment in the child, defined as tamyīz, evidenced by more fully grasping ideas of right and wrong, showing independence of thought and a greater intellectual and emotional appreciation for the world and others around her. Whilst not an objective marker for a child’s development across Islamic cultures, heptadic markers for tamyīz often threshold a preparation for formal learning, beginning observance of the daily prayers and special identification in the sacred law.28 As a being endowed with mind and a soul, occupying a body, the child bears similarities with adults and yet are not viewed as identical to them. This emerges as a trope in medieval discourses fashioned by the overtures made in how their uniqueness is to be treated. The work of the fourteenth-century jurisconsult and theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) marks here a particularly useful place in late medieval thought on children. His Tuḥfat al-mawdūd fī aḥkām almawlūd (A Present for the Beloved on the Rules concerning the Treatment of Infants), appearing at the end of the classical period, is a purposeful and incisive look at childhood drawn from the heritage of antiquity through Hippocrates and Galen with an attempt to ‘host’ these ideas through the medium of an Islamic nomos.29 Ibn al-Qayyim’s treatment of the child begins within the Qur’anic idea of pre-birth through to maturity. Of note is the significance and subtlety of treatment given the infant and the first stages of development. The chapter entitled ‘Birth Shock’ deals with, for example, the movement of the child as a soul in the Divine presence into a world of differentiation and Divine separation.30 It is for this reason that Ibn al-Qayyim recommends avoiding excessive rocking of the 27 The age of fifteen is also marked in the Prophetic tradition, since he forbade the fourteenyear-old Ibn ʿUmar to join the Battle of Uḥud, though a year later he agreed to include him among the warriors of Khandaq. While reaffirming the age of fifteen as a criterion of maturity, this hadith also reflects a general Islamic objection to the participation of children in war. 28  Gilʿadi, Children of Islam, pp. 5–15. 29  I use ‘host’ here, as does Shahid Rahman, to avoid a discourse of mere ‘influence’ from (late) antiquity. Shahid Rahman, “Introduction. The Major Breakthrough in Scientific Practice”, The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition. Science, Logic, Epistemology and their Interactions, ed. Shahid Rahman, Tony Street and Hassan Tahir, Dordrecht: Springer, 2008, pp. 1–40. 30 The comparative ways in which infants are treated in the thought of late antiquity and Islam is yet to be fully developed. For possible sources of comparison with the ideas of Ibn Qayyim, see David A. Bosworth, Infant Weeping in Akkadian, Hebrew, and Greek Literature, Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016; Shawn W. Flynn, “Broadening Our Perspective of Ancient Children. Historical-Comparative Methods and the Value of Ancient Children”, Children and

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infant, especially during the first three months of life, since the soul is learning to comport to the material world. The sacred entry of the child, juxtaposes a tradition of the Prophet in which, speaking of the infant, he explains that the crying of a child is, for [the first] four months of life, the confession that There is no God but God; for another four months, a prayer for Muhammad; and, for four months, a prayer for his parents.31

Other significant milestones in these early days of life are the child smiling at forty days which for Ibn al-Qayyim is the sign of awareness of self and the world as well as the cognitive development of the child through dreams, appearing approximately at two months.32 The work is noted as a melding of sacred discourses within the larger received medical knowledge of Ibn al-Qayyim’s day. Avner Gilʿadi argues in this regard that ‘a remarkable feature of some of the Islamic paediatric and childrearing treaties is their wholeness in the sense that they deal, side by side, with physical-medical and psychological-pedagogical questions.’33 This is itself an achievement whose influence from antiquity cannot be disregarded in an assessment of Islamic views on the child and yet the singular rendering of the child, through Islamic beliefs, equally stands to give these contributions a unique hue of difference.

Philosophy and Becoming The variegated literature deemed to be ‘philosophical’ in nature presents equally fecund terrain for the treatment of children within the medieval Islamic imagination. This ranges from inspiring accounts of the sensitivity of thought given to children’s upbringing to their particular propensities as receptacles for spiritual ascent. Key amongst these is the role of nurturing and shepherding the innate potential of the child such that she may become a self-realised adult.34 For the contemporary reader the symbiosis between certain works of antiquity Methods. Listening to and Learning from Children in the Biblical World, ed. Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 104–23. 31  The hadith master al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071) includes this tradition in his collection, though not without reservations. Franz Rosenthal, Man versus Society in Medieval Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 941–64, at p. 948. 32 Gilʿadi, Children of Islam, pp. 23–9. 33  Ibid., p. 30. 34 In this regard, particularly the intellectual history of the divergences and congruity between Islamic thought and that of late antiquity has yet to be written and would, in the authors estimation, be a very fruitful contribution to the philosophy of education. Peter Brown’s initial contribution in this literature through a historical comparison between paideia and adab is especially informative. See Peter Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam”, Moral Conduct and Authority. The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 23–37.

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and Islamic philosophy in this regard is well documented and bears a family resemblance in terms of the nurturing of the children, whether it be education or general advisements on upbringing.35 However, these similarities, though evident and numerous, ought not to be collapsed into a conclusion of mere replication in Islamic thought, since within the degrees of respective difference, and at other times ostensible differences in kind, Muslim cogitations upon the child serve to offer native responses to old questions regarding childhood, its nature and subsequent reverence. The popular ethical text by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 673/1201), Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī (‘Nasirean Ethics’), serves as an example in its section, in particular, dedicated to the ‘Regulation of Children.’ Whilst the text uses the popular taxonomy of ethical and social categories found in the obscure firstcentury philosopher Bryson, it makes use, as with Ibn al-Qayyim, of a broad engagement with Islamic sources to enunciate the religion’s own ethical ideals. Al-Ṭūsī mentions, with regard to the child, for example, that the first task of the parent is to name the child well, and to provide, if necessary, a wet nurse who is religiously observant and intellectually perspicacious.36 Next, once dentition is complete, efforts should be made in the refinement of character, and in this sense al-Ṭūsī encourages parents to ‘follow nature’37 in that as faculties within the child emerge, the greater labours are to be taken to see its perfection, since they are related to her inherent goodly disposition (fiṭra). The first manifestation of this is shame which should be encouraged, since it is the dawning of a child’s true moral and intellectual development.38 These counsels continue through the early development of children to the importance of positive reinforcement, helping them control their emerging appetitive faculty, acquiring good company and refraining from impudence. In helping the child prepare for study or the ac35  Much has been made of this fact with the discovery and use of Bryson in this feature of Islamic thought playing a particularly vital role. For example, Hellmut Ritter’s (1917) claim that the entirety of Islamic literature on economics is derived from Neo-Pythagorean Bryson. Hellmut Ritter, Ein arabisches Handbuch der Handelswissenschaft, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012 (reprint of 1916). For a more nuanced exploration of intellectual influences in this regard see, Simon Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam. A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 57–68. 36  The importance of these two criteria for wet nurses are found in a number of sources, originating in the prophetic traditions. For a recent historical survey and contribution to this field, see Avner Gilʿadi, Muslim Midwives. The Craft of Birthing in the Premodern Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 18–56. 37  Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, The Nasirean Ethics by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, trans. G. M. Wickens, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1964, p. 167. 38 Bryson makes reference to this feature of a child’s development arguing ‘that the best sort of boy is the one who is endowed by nature with shame’. Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam, p. 18. In terms of its modern incarnation, the influential developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson, places shame as second in his eight stages for the development of a healthy personality and psyche. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993, pp. 251–4.

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quisition of a craft, the parent is also advised to appreciate the child’s own propensities with the demands of the world: It is to be preferred, however, that the nature of the child should be considered and his circumstances taken into account, using physiognomical insight and discernment, in order to determine his innate fitness and aptitude for any craft or science.39

The eleventh-century philosopher Ibn Miskawayh, in his Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq (‘The Refinement of Character’), which stands amongst the most noted works on philosophical ethics in medieval Islam, similarly recommends the psychical and mental predilections of the child to be balanced in order that the perfection of his character is attained since as ‘perception becomes correct, his insight true […], his deliberation [can become] sound’.40 Similarly modelling on Bryson,41 Ibn Miskawayh deliberates on the acquisition of good conduct as prefiguring wisdom and maturity. Where this may be acquired remains a debate amongst the ardent and popular philosophical defences for its acquisition through reliance on ‘nature’. Another popular medieval text which concordantly is noted for its influence in championing nature as an ‘instructor of humanity,’ Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, is a tour de force of insights on childhood.42 Ibn Ṭufayl’s philosophical novel sees an infant, Ḥayy, appear in the world and follows him in his journey to seeking human actualisation (al-insān al-kāmil). In order to do so he learns, in his first seven years of life, to interact with an environment through confronting his emotions, such as his increasing shame about his nakedness, or envy for the horns of deer he sees. This ‘education’ converges with his development and the practical reason he acquires as a young man. The child in these philosophical texts, considered to varying degrees as tabula rasa, informs a number of accounts on the child with an adjoining emphasis on habit formation (tadbīr) as paramount in the guidance of a child. In this regard the child is not considered as unfinished or incomplete but represents its own cordoned-off and unique phase of life.43 39 Naṣīr

al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, The Nasirean Ethics, p. 171. ibn Muḥammad Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq. The Refinement of Character, trans. Constantine K. Zurayk, Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1968, p. 36. Elsewhere he will use the trope of ‘order’ to exercise the importance of balancing the self, after the Platonic derivation of the psyche contained within the tirade of the logos, thymos and eros or in Ibn Miskawayh’s allegory, the king, lion and pig, respectively (ibid., p. 46). 41 This section from the second discourse in Ibn Miskawayh’s work is entitled ‘A section on the education of the young, and of boys in particular, most of which I have copied from the work of ‘Bryson,’ pp. 50–61. 42  Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. A Philosophical Tale, trans. Lenn Goodman, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 1–21. 43 The antipodal and once popular theory of the child by Philippe Ariès, now thoroughly debunked in the scholarship, says that children were not objects of love for their parents in premodern societies. Since its publication in the 1960’s this argument has proven to have little in common with the lived realities of children both in the Islamic and Christian world, respectively. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick, London: Vintage, 1965, pp. 33–49. 40 Aḥmad

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Sufism and the Actualisation of Self Within the spiritual traditions of Islam, mention of children is brought to bear in a variety of ways to illustrate, be it as metaphor or allegory, their significance in the path to God. In the nurturing of a child, the sufis often speak of muḥarrar in relation to the child as being put in ‘service to God.’44 The term derives from an account in which the mother of the Virgin Mary offers her infant in faithful service to God’s worship (Q 3:35–56), intending that such oblation will free the child from want of this world. The ascetic and theologian Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765) defines this as the real meaning of freedom, such that it lays in ‘the perfection of one’s servitude’ (ʿubūdiyya) as unconditioned obedience to God.45 Al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), elaborating upon the primordial nature of the child (fiṭra) says that ‘just like the new-born baby who knows no shelter except for his mother’s breast, the mutawakkil [one who ardently trusts in God] is not rightly guided to anyone except to God.’46 The child represents in other contexts a marvel of spiritual beings, foreshadowing what may be achieved through the acolyte’s tamyīz (discernment), discipline and erudition as a disciple in the path of God.47 For Ghazālī, as an uncut jewel ready to be moulded, the child serves as a special connection with the world of the unseen (al-ghayb).48 A sentiment reflected by the modern subcontinent poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1357/1938) who designates the child, in The Child and the Candle, as a preeminent Divine blessing in whose being signs and spiritual leitmotifs are laid bare.49 This is a commonly found motif, namely, the child having access to other realms of existence. The Moroccan saint ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (d. 1132/1719) argues, for example, that babes converse with angels and that Syriac is the language of new-borns.50 It is therefore not uncommon amongst the sufis for a living master 44  The term itself appears in the Qur’an in reference to manumission. Kristin Sands, Sufi Commentaries on the Qur’an in Classical Islam, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 97–8. 45  Kristin Sands, Sufi Commentaries, p. 98. 46  Arin Shawkat Salamah-Qudsi, Sufism and Early Islamic Piety. Personal and Communal Dynamics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 97–100. 47  Margaret Malamud, “Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning. The Master-Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (1996), pp. 89–117, at pp. 90–101. 48  Gamze Erdem Türkelli, Children’s Rights and Business. Governing Obligations and Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 8. 49 Here Iqbal’s poetics reflect the early English Romantic predilection for identifying the child’s innocence. See William Wordsworth’s Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, in which the poet writes of the child, ‘God is with thee when we know not.’ See http://www. amiqbalpoetry.com/2012/11/the-child-and-candle.html (accessed 20 September 2020). 50  Al-Dabbāgh mentions that ‘if someone observes closely the speech of small children, he’ll find much Syriac in their speech. The reason for this is that learning something in childhood is like an inscription in stone. Adam – peace be upon him – spoke to his children when they were small and calmed them down in Syriac and he told them the names of different kinds of

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to recognise a future spiritual heir while they are still a baby51 or, as does the late medieval sufi, Ibn Qufl, allude to their pre-eminence as paragons: If you want to become a saint (abdāl), adopt some of the qualities of little children. They have five qualities which, if found in adults, would make them saints: They do not worry about their sustenance; they do not complain about the Creator when they are ill; they share their food with others; […] when they quarrel, they do not bear grudges and are eager to reconcile; and when they are afraid, tears stream from their eyes.52

Since the child’s moral and intellectual development is first made evident through the appearance of shame (related to thymos), i. e. her emotional sensibilities, it is mentionable that spiritual ascension is often spoken of in sufi texts which retains the importance of the emotions (albeit in disciplined forms) and loosens the grip of reason (nous), so as to experience higher spiritual truths.53 The task being for the scriptural acolyte here not to become ‘child-like’ but rather to see, in one sense, that the child, as metaphor, summits the path to God which we are mindful to learn from. The varied uses of the child in this way help to manifest a generous conception of his or her innocence before God and even standing as an example of what may be achieved in what is the most elemental of spiritual enterprises namely, the abandonment of self to lauding God.

Education and Preliminary Matters for Pedagogic Dialogue The breadth and variety of attention to the conception of the child in medieval Islam cannot be complete without a concomitant meditation on the role and value of education. This being precisely since, in its theory and practice, education offers a way for these ideals to enunciate themselves in the civilisafood and drinks in Syriac’. Al-Dabbāgh, Pure Gold from the Words of Sayyidī ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz alDabbāgh, p. 427–8. 51  There are a number of accounts of saints being recognised as masters whilst still infants. The Khwajagani master Muhammad Sammasi, for example, famously recognised Bahā al-Dīn Naqshband, founder of the Naqshbandi Sufi order upon first seeing him as a babe. Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies. Religion and Society in Medieval Islam, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 89. 52  Rosenthal takes the citation from Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s, Ḥusn al-muḥāḍara. As for the identity and biography of Ibn Qufl, Suyūṭī relies on Faḍl Allāh’s Masālik. Rosenthal, Man versus Society in Medieval Islam, p. 958, fn. 63. 53 Defining this characteristic mien of sufi experiences, Toshihiko Izutsu comments on its popular iteration within Ibn ʿArabī’s system of the self-realised human being as a ‘man like this knows God by ‘unveiling’, an immediate tasting, not by Reason. Of course, he, too, exercises his Reason within his proper domain, but never pushes it beyond its natural limits, rather he readily goes beyond the realm of Reason and follows the judgments given by mystical intuition. Such a man is a knower (ʿarif) and a servant of the Lord (ʿabd rabb)’. Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism. A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, p. 254, italics added.

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tion, especially since learning is a designated religious duty for the faithful. ‘My Lord educated me and He perfected my education’ (addabanī Rabbī wa-aḥsana taʾdībī)54 says a hadith, whilst the Prophet is also quoted to have said ‘acquiring knowledge is a must for all Muslims.’55 If we borrow Franz Rosenthal’s argument that a generous conception of knowledge, in its pursuit and honouring, defines Islam as a religion, then education is equally a counterpart to that genus.56 However, this is not to exclusively define education as discursive learning alone but rather as tarbiya (nurturing) of the natural propensities of becoming for the child. It is in the acquisition of knowledge and the nurturing of wisdom that the child may flourish and see her apotheosis in comporting to the Divine reality of her ʿubudiyya namely, reliance and servitude to God. This can be determined as the ends of learning, as the realisation of the self through knowing God via adab.57 In drawing the Islamic significance of one’s intentions for any act, the faithful are drawn to recognising that learning is a path towards eudaimonia, since it is a Divine means towards Divine proximity. Whilst there is no one formal offering from the scriptural and prophetic sources specifying how children must be taught, a useful schema is found in a popular tradition attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib as well as Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq which broadly mirrors the historical practices of Muslim communities and advises that ‘one should play with the child for the first seven years, educate them for seven and make them your wazīr (confidant) for seven’.58 Each phase here corresponds to the virtues and propensities found in an apposite phase of the child’s life which education ought to harness.59 This is such that the first seven years 54  Here addabanī is the third person past tense of the verb addaba, the verbal noun of which is taʾdīb (a-d-b). The term taʾdībī translated as ‘education’ mirrors synonyms of manners, etiquette cultivation and urbanity. Rüdiger Seesemann translates, for example, both addabanī and taʾdībī similarly as ‘education’ in reference to the milieu of educational discourses within Muslim medieval and modern societies. Rüdiger Seesemann, “ʿIlm and Adab Revisited. Knowledge Transmission and Character Formation in Islamic Africa”, The Piety of Learning. Islamic Studies in Honor of Stefan Reichmuth, ed. Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 13–37, at p. 22, fn. 29. 55  Ibn Mājah, Sunan, “Sunna”, 224. 56  Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant. The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 240–333. 57  Talal Al-Azem, “The Transmission of Adab. Educational Ideals and their Institutional Manifestations”, Philosophies of Islamic Education. Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses, ed. Nadeem A. Memon and Mujadad Zaman, London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 112–27, at pp. 121–2. 58 Al-Azhar University and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Children in Islam. Their Care, Upbringing And Protection, 2005, at p. 3: https://www.humanitarianresponse. info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/documents/files/children_in_islam_english. pdf (accessed 14 September 2020). 59  For the normative pedagogic practices of these heptadic markers in Muslim societies, see the case of Islamic learning in Western Africa. Rudolph T. Ware, The Walking Qur’an. Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014, pp. 41–2.

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reflect the development of the child’s personality and her moulding through active play ‘with’ her parents.60 After seven years the child is incorporated into the wider sway of social consciousness by observing the rights of others in spite of her age. This is illustrated by theologian Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 332/944), who encourages the child to be instructed in social welfare and empathy towards others when he recommends that ‘the believer is obligated to instruct his child in generosity and charity just as he is obligated to instruct him in monotheist doctrine and belief, for the love of this world is the source of all sin.’61 Education is then typically the coalescing of tarbiya (from the verb rabbā, to grow and cultivate) as part of the child’s intellectual, moral and physical development. It is here that we see the advancement of memorisation of the Qur’an and other sacred texts in medieval Islamic societies, the mnemonic use of poetry to help learn the catechisms of the religion, as well as other disciplines, since the mind is, at this moment, primed for the inculcation of rote knowledge.62 A prophetic narration says, ‘everyone finds easy that for which he was created’,63 and in terms of a child’s education, this reflects a broader acknowledgement of children as growing and maturing beings such that education is a denouement to their selfrealisation. This is however, not without struggle, since the activities which may accentuate her fiṭra, recommended by the Prophet himself, such as horse riding, swimming and archery,64 each bear a pedagogical mien to help train her mind and body in discipling the perturbations of the soul.65 It for this reason also that Ghazālī warns against exposing the child to many indulgences, since whilst the

60  The value of active play with parents has shown to be meritorious for the future development of the child. Sally Weale, “Physical play with fathers may help children control emotions, study finds”, The Guardian, 30 Jun 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/30/ physical-play-with-fathers-may-help-children-control-emotions-study-finds (accessed 14 July 2020). 61  Amy Singer, Charity in Islamic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 85. 62  For the role of memory in medieval Islamic learning, see Burhān al-Dīn al-Zarnūjī, Taʿlīm al-mutaʿallim ṭarīq al-taʿallum. Instruction of the Student. The Method of Learning, trans. G. E. von Grunebaum and Theodora M. Abel, 2003, Chicago IL: Starlatch Press, pp. 47–50; Almog Kasher, “Early Pedagogical Grammars of Arabic”, The Foundations of Arabic Linguistics III, ed. Georgine Ayoub and Kees Versteegh, Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 146–66. 63  Al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-Mahjub, p. 4. 64  The prevalence of these activities is to be found across medieval Muslim culture. In terms of archery, for example, see the popular Ottoman text of Mustafa Kani (Telhîs-i resâil-i rumât). Mustafa Kani, Sacred Archery. The Forty Prophetic Traditions, trans. Radhia Shukrullah, Glastonbury: Himma Press, 2017, pp. 65–76. Horse riding, equestrian knowledge and hippology were studied under the general term furūsiyya. Bashir Mohamed (ed.), The Arts of the Muslim Knight. The Furusiyya Art Foundation Collection, Paris: Skira, 2008. 65  This of course does not aver physical discipline of students as a reality. Indeed, the frequency with which it is mentioned in medieval texts offers, at least partially, evidence of its use. Gilʿadi, Children of Islam, London: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 60–6.

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fiṭra, and its puissance, prevails with an energy for moral guidance, the distractions of the world, if not fought, are equally corrupting upon the soul.66 In one sense, all cultural manifestations are a consequence of a resolution between a reading of the inner life and of the external manifestation of a child’s world as parsed in due reference to the act of learning. Where perhaps in Islamic thought, the geist is harnessed by the specificities of its spiritual, metaphysical, legal and cosmological hues, these are forged in a substantive ideal of adab. In attaining this goal, education ought not to be subordinated to a field of mere ethics since this may cause it to delimit the possible avenues of interfaith and intellectual comparison. Specifically, reference to the Greek notion of paideia, and its encompassing reference to play or the Christian conception of the imitatio Christi seem to suggest that a history of Islamic paideia has yet to be written.67 However, this is not so much a petitio principii as an assumption of cause in educational history by not capitalising on the particular ways the child is conceived within Islamic thought. It is evident from the scriptural, religious and other resources that there exists a consistent and penetrating treatment of the child as theologically referenced, anthropologically unique and pedagogically captivating to Islamicate civilisation more generally. Here then is the beginning of a theologically-derived anthropological comparison which should be cautious about negative generalisations. Chief amongst these is that while an Islamic oeuvre may seem an acolyte to modern discussions on the child, this is not due to its historical disinterest in the subject matter. Rather, in the emerging field of childhood studies, one ought not to consider Islamic contributions in this regard as slight. Similarly, as a preface to methodologies of studying childhood historically, the academic literature is itself becoming aware of its own biases in the study and writing of educational history, of which childhood plays no small role. These include the range of questions historians are willing to ask of their historical sources, the methods they choose to deploy and what essentially counts as ‘child’ and ‘education.’ 68 A potential consequence of this remains that the influence of Enlightenment 66  Such recommendations may seem severe to the modern ear, yet they derive from a particular understanding of the attractive qualities of the world such that makes the great sway of humanity, according to Ghazālī, pusillanimous in the wake of their allure. As a counter, Ghazālī uses the example of the early mystic Sahl ibn ʿAbdallāh at-Tustarī (d. 283/896) and his childhood as a model for education. Al-Ghazālī, On Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires. Books XXII and XXIII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences, trans. T. J. Winter, Cambridge: Islamic Text Society, 1995, pp. 75–82. 67 This is the conclusion Shahab Ahmed comes to in his discussion of adab and paideia as mutual educational ideals within the philosophy of education. Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 380, fn. 162. 68  William Richardson, “Method in the History of Education”, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 48–64.

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ideals and the history of nation-building places Oriental cultures on the fringes of what is a European hegemony over the ideas of education and learning. This is equally problematic in light of more recent revisions of Enlightenment history such as that by the historian David Sorkin whose argument places its rise as essentially one of a religious disposition which led to the foundations of modern thought.69 This cannot therefore elide the voice of religion in the rise of public reason as forging the modern rights of the child. We cannot therefore proceed and infer that the rise of the ‘child’ as an academic subject matter is solely a secular (modern) project or that its prerogative belongs to any one religious community.70 What is then a positive step for fecund discourse is the inclusion of a broader discussion of the child offered by Islamic thought.71 This ought not to be conceived as entirely ‘unique’, since a number of family resemblances with the Abrahamic traditions supply a consilience of monotheism which honours children as ‘created in the image of God.’ Rather they are ‘distinct’ due to the sensibilities, persuasions and the nomos forged by their respective theological and spiritual differences. This is what Avner Gilʿadi calls the ‘great tradition’ of interest in children within medieval Islam, defined by an investment in ‘the intellectual, the emotional, and the economic’ needs of the child.72 The challenge of the twenty-first century remains how we may harmonise these rich ideas from premodern discourses with the realities and circumstances facing children today. This question rings as propitious not merely in the Muslim world, which hosts some of the youngest populations in the world, but also in Europe and North America which host amongst the most aged. The problem is compounded, in the West especially, by the fact that in most developed societies happiness and fulfilment amongst children do not necessarily positively correlate to GDP. The Good Childhood annual report, for example, found that children in the UK are the least happy they have ever been since reporting started a decade ago, and they display ‘a significant decrease in happiness with life as a whole’.73 Similarly, the World Health Organisation has included the health and the human 69  David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 1–22. 70  Within the Protestant liberal tradition, thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, amongst others, whose reliance, critique and tension towards the Enlightenment can be said to have played a necessary role in the development of their own ideas. Robert Merrihew Adams, “Faith and religious knowledge”, The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 35–52. 71 For the inclusion of such ideas in the literature, see Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge (eds.), Children and Childhood in World Religions. Primary Sources and Texts, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 72  Avner Gilʿadi, “Herlihy’s Thesis Revisited. Some Notes on Investment in Children in Medieval Muslim Societies”, Journal of Family History, 36 (2011), pp. 235–47, at pp. 241–2. 73  The Children’s Society, The Good Childhood Report 2019 Summary, 2019: https://saphna. co/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/the_good_childhood_report_2019.pdf (accessed 7 October 2021).

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rights of children among the key risks of the twenty-first century in the light of climate change, economic exploitation and social unrest.74 It is evident that the child is losing out on the promise of economic prosperity and that the need for religious dialogue, as shown here, offers a sensitivity which is probably necessary at a time when the ostensible language of economic liberalism is less well adjusted to conceive the human being as more than a subject of pecuniary interest. Not to then include a religious dialogue in this moment seems supercilious. As has been argued, the historical attention given the child in terms of theorising upon its nature, its nurturing as well as education, is evidence of how the world can bring out his or her innate potentia. Since the world is not ‘Fallen’, an Islamic mien towards creation has historically been an ontologically positive endeavour with a corresponding sensibility towards the child which, in varying degrees, stands distinct in the Abrahamic family. Its panoply of source material from scripture, law, literature, philosophy and spiritual epistles informs its claims that the child is sui generis and ought to be observed as occupying its own vision of the world which we must enter in order to understand.

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Seesemann, Rüdiger, “ʿIlm and Adab Revisited. Knowledge Transmission and Character Formation in Islamic Africa”, The Piety of Learning. Islamic Studies in Honor of Stefan Reichmuth, ed. Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 13–37. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, London: Penguin Classics, 2015. Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, London: Penguin Classics, 2015. Shuraydi, Hasan, The Raven and the Falcon. Youth versus Old Age in Medieval Arabic Literature, Leiden: Brill, 2014. Singer, Amy, Charity in Islamic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sorkin, David, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Swain, Simon, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam. A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Türkelli, Gamze Erdem, Children’s Rights and Business. Governing Obligations and Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-, The Nasirean Ethics by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, trans. G. M. Wickens, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1964. Ware, Rudolph T., The Walking Qur’an. Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Weale, Sally, “Physical play with fathers may help children control emotions, study finds”, The Guardian, 30 June 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/30/p​h​y​ s​i​c​a​l​-play-with-fathers-may-help-children-control-emotions-study-finds (accessed 14 July 2020). WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission, A Future for the World’s Children?, 2020: https:// www.who.int/docs/default-source/future-for-children  – -campaign-materials/lancetcommission-child-health-toolkit.pdf ?sfvrsn=a793d261_2 (accessed 14 July 2020). Zarnūjī, Burhān al-Dīn al-, Taʿlīm al-mutaʿallim ṭarīq al-taʿallum. Instruction of the Student. The Method of Learning, trans. G. E. von Grunebaum and Theodora M. Abel, Chicago IL: Starlatch Press, 2003.

Part V: Dignity and Sinfulness

‘These people have no grasp of God’s true measure’ (Q 39:67) Does the Doctrine of Original Sin do Justice to God and to Humanity? Daniel A. Madigan SJ One of the most often repeated claims regarding the theological anthropology of Islam is ‘There is no original sin in Islam’. The Christian position is thought to underestimate both God and humanity. However, it is not always easy to know what to make of such an affirmation, since it is not always clear what precisely the speaker means by the term ‘original sin’. It is this difficulty that I would like to explore in this essay. Are we understanding one another properly when we disagree about original sin; and is there something in our disagreements that might be enlightening for both of us if we could clarify our meanings? According to some thinkers – and not only Muslims – humanity has no need for atonement, no need of a saviour to accomplish something we cannot achieve for ourselves. Much of the central vocabulary that clusters around the Christian notion of sin – ‘atonement,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘expiation,’ ‘ransom’ – finds little place in the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition. As is well known, the Qur’an denies at least the significance and perhaps even the very historicity of the death of Jesus. His cross – if, indeed, it was him on the cross – certainly plays no role in God’s engagement with humanity. Although the Qur’an recognises both the murderous intent of Jesus’ enemies, and his own readiness to accept the consequences of obedience to his mission, whatever took place on Calvary seems to be read as a failure on Jesus’ part that required divine intervention.1 According to Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Islamic soteriology is ‘the diametrical opposite of that of traditional Christianity. Indeed the term “salvation” has no equivalent in the religious vocabulary of Islam. There is no saviour and there is nothing from which to be saved’.2 ‘Falāḥ, or the positive achievement in space and time of the divine will, is 1  For a presentation of both pre-modern and modern readings of the Qur’anic verses in question, see Abdullah Saeed, Reading the Qur’ān in the Twenty-first Century. A Contextualist Approach, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, pp. 129–46. 2 Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths, ed. Ataullah Siddiqui, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1998, p. 15.

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the Islamic counterpart of Christian “deliverance” and “redemption”.’ Al-Faruqi states it strongly, but his position is not unrepresentative of a substantial part of the tradition: Islam holds man to be not in need of any salvation. Instead of assuming him to be religiously and ethically fallen, Islamic daʿwah acclaims him as the khalīfah of Allah, perfect in form, and endowed with all that is necessary to fulfil the divine will, indeed even loaded with the grace of revelation!3

Al-Faruqi sees this position as thoroughly modern and he encourages Christians to embrace it: ‘For modern Muslims and Christians the way out of the predicament of sin is in human rather than divine hands. Salvation is achieved by continuous education and each person must educate himself.’4 It is not just that the claimed atonement in Christ is deemed ineffective; in a ‘modern’ mindset it is considered unnecessary.

Sin and Atonement The negation of original sin usually involves several elements. To enumerate the principal ones: 1. the criticism that Christian theology is overly pessimistic and fails to recognise the goodness of God’s human creation; 2. the charge that too much is made of the single transgression of Adam and his wife – such a small matter could not have had lasting consequences for all their offspring; therefore; 3. the questioning of any hereditary or social understanding of sin and guilt, with a concomitant stress on individual responsibility and culpability; 4. the affirmation that, like human transgression, divine forgiveness is a relatively straightforward matter. Forgiveness is a free act of divine sovereignty, costing God little, and so there is no need for a saviour to effect for human beings something we are unable to do for ourselves; 5. the criticism that the supposed mechanism of redemption by the death of Jesus would only seem to multiply and deepen human sinfulness rather than heal it; 3 Al-Faruqi, “On the Nature of Islamic Daʿwah”, 316 f.; cited in Charles D. Fletcher, Ismaʿīl al-Faruqi (1921–1986) and Inter-Faith Dialogue. The Man, The Scholar, The Participant, PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2008, p. 225. See also Charles D. Fletcher, Muslim-Christian Engagement in the Twentieth Century. The Principles of Interfaith Dialogue and the Work of Ismaʻil Al-Faruqi, London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. 4 Al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity. Diatribe or Dialogue”, repr. in al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths, pp. 241–80, at p. 242.

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6. the objection that the Cross would seem to demonstrate the weakness rather than the power of God, who is inexplicably unable to save humanity without this counter-intuitive manoeuvre. 7. The criticism that the Christian understanding of salvation short-circuits the moral task and responsibility of the human person and leads to an arrogant complacency about one’s ultimate fate, and to a passivity in the face of the world’s needs. As with most aspects of the Islamic critique of Christian faith, there are here salutary reminders for the Christian theologian about the possible traps into which we may fall as we try to express what we believe about God and humanity. We do not want, after all, to merit the Qur’an’s accusation against the pagans that ‘these people have no grasp of God’s true measure’ (Q 39:67). It may also be the case, however, that the Christian affirmation of original sin has some questions to pose to the Islamic tradition. Some of these points of mutual questioning will pinpoint irreducible differences in our theological anthropologies – differences that make us who we are and that cannot be abandoned. The close consideration of other questions, however, may uncover some more elements in common than we are accustomed to acknowledge. This paper has three tasks: 1) to identify and acknowledge valid Muslim critiques of some Christian understandings of sin and salvation; 2) to sketch a theology of sin (and, by extension, of salvation) which steers its way between the various pitfalls to which the Islamic critique points and yet remains true to Christian tradition; and 3) to examine whether the Qur’an’s understanding of humanity’s situation is as one-dimensional as some would suggest. Rather than approach these three tasks one at a time in sequence, let me take each of the points of critique and attempt all three tasks with regard to each of them. It is important, however, to make five introductory points: First, sin and redemption should not be thought of as sequential, but rather as concomitant. Our alienation from God, and God’s activity to overcome that alienation so as to bring to fulfilment what God intended in creating us – both are continuing processes, and one does not simply finish when the other begins. As Rahner would put it, though we speak of them in temporal terms one after the other, they exist in a circular relationship with each other. We cannot understand fully the nature of guilt except in the experience of being forgiven, and of realising from what we have been delivered.5 This is why it is difficult to speak of original sin in isolation from atonement (literally at-one-ment, that is, making one). This is a key point to which we will return, since an important element of the critique we are considering is an understandable dissatisfaction with the 5  Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, New York NY: Crossroad, 1978, p. 93.

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idea of sin having been completely dealt with and of atonement as a fait accompli. Second, as Charles J. Adams puts it, ‘The centrality of man’s predicament as a sinner does not derive from logical considerations, nor even from the authority of revelation, but from the quality of life. If Christians speak of themselves as sinners, this is so because they feel themselves to be such.’6 That is to say, the basic datum for the doctrine of original sin is not the scriptural account of the sin of Adam and Eve, but rather the experience of human existence itself.7 It might be more accurate to say that the sense of human alienation from God is the origin of the story of Adam and Eve’s sin, rather than the other way around. Third, because the notion of original sin begins from reflection on humanity’s existential situation, there will be many theologies of original sin and of redemption, some more convincing than others. I do not attempt here to treat all of them, and certainly not to defend all of them. Fourth, the discussion will privilege some of the most trenchant critics of the doctrines of original sin and atonement, not because they represent fully the variety of the Islamic tradition, but precisely because they are the most searching and uncompromising in their challenge to Christian theology. There are obviously other ways in the tradition of conceiving of the way in which humans become one with God – the original and literal sense of at-one-ment – as well as of conceiving of what it is that causes the alienation from God that needs to be overcome. Consideration of those will have to wait for another opportunity. Fifth, I recognise that the readings of the Qur’an offered here are not Muslim readings, and it is not the place of a Christian to enunciate an Islamic theology of sin and salvation. Nonetheless, I hope it becomes clear that a Christian reading the Qur’an can recognise there some affirmations that seem to support at least some of what has been criticised as wrong-headed in Christian theologies of sin and atonement. 1. The criticism that Christian theology is overly pessimistic and fails to recognise the goodness of God’s human creation In his remarkable book on Christian ethics, Isma’il al-Faruqi dismisses the Christian understanding of sin as ‘an idealogical [sic] presupposition’ rather than something based on observation. ‘Peccatism’, as he dismissively calls the view of man as a sinner, ‘is not a view of man as he is, not a description of his reality, but the view of him which Christian dogma requires and then dictates’.8 Peccatism 6 Charles J. Adams, “Islam and Christianity. The opposition of similarities”, Logos Islamikos. Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis Wickens, ed. Roger M. Savory and Dionisius A. Agius, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984, pp. 287–306, at p. 296. 7 Rahner, Foundations, p. 110: ‘We arrive at the knowledge, experience and the meaning of what Original Sin is, in the first place, from a religious-existential interpretation of our own situation, from ourselves.’ 8  Isma‘il Ragi A. al-Faruqi, Christian Ethics. A Historical and Systematic Analysis of its Dominant Ideas, Montreal: McGill, 1986, p. 221.

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becomes an obsession with human weakness and goes hand in hand with ‘saviourism’, the wrongheaded belief that humanity needs someone to effect what we are incapable of doing for ourselves, and that all that is necessary has been effected in Jesus. In fact, al-Faruqi claims that the successively more exaggerated claims for Jesus logically required a similar exaggeration of the evil from which he was believed to have saved humanity.9 These are the key aspects of what he likes to call ‘Christianism’ to distinguish it from the putatively original religion of Jesus. Al-Faruqi neatly illustrates Adams’ claim that ‘Muslims who do not find it important to give first priority in the religious lexicon to “sin” can bypass the concept because it does not correspond to or express something essential in their perception of themselves’.10 Al-Faruqi would argue in response that, even though Christian theologians have consistently maintained the ‘peccatist’ position in theory, when it comes to practice, the general run of Christians follow what he would consider a more normal human ethic of worldly engagement and ethical self-improvement.11 His observation is not far wide of the mark. Unfortunately, it did not prompt him to question whether his description of the ‘peccatist’ position was accurate, or whether he might have needed to take more account of the Christian concepts of sanctification, and satisfaction for sin. It may be that Eastern Christian theologies have found a better balance between realism about human sinfulness on the one hand and a positive regard for God’s human creation on the other. In seeking to explain some of the differences between Western and Orthodox theologies, Andrew Louth maintains that the East never lost sight of the primacy in God’s intention of the ‘arc’ that stretches from creation to deification. Humans departed from this arc, introducing sin, death and destruction through the misuse of their freedom, and this needs to be dealt with. A second, minor ‘arc’ opens in the story, stretching from Fall to Redemption. However, there is always the risk that this minor arc can become the exclusive focus of the theologian’s attention, at the expense of God’s overarching purpose in creating human beings.12 Perhaps what we see in al-Faruqi’s critique is a reaction to an overemphasis, particularly in the West, on the minor arc. The question remains, however, whether his vision takes seriously enough the amply demonstrated human alienation from God. It is true that notions like Calvin’s ‘total depravity’ can lead to, or be mistaken for, fundamentally pessimistic views of human nature, views that ignore God’s own judgment of creation that it was ‘very good’ (Gen 1:31). Yet, that divine judgement is precisely what the doctrine of original sin seeks to protect. It insists that the alienation we sense between God and humanity has its origin  Al-Faruqi, Christian Ethics, p. 229.  Adams, “Islam and Christianity”, p. 296. 11  Al-Faruqi, Christian Ethics, p. 219. 12  Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, Downer’s Grove IL: Intervarsity Press, 2013, pp. 69–70.  9 10

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not in God and God’s good creation, but in human beings’ free choices. The doctrine of original sin does not deny the innate dignity of the human person – a dignity which is, like human existence itself, entirely a gift. Rather it underlines the difficulty humans have – and, we sense, always have had – in accepting and living that dignity. In what does human dignity consist? In being God’s khalīfa, God’s vicegerent on earth (Q 2:30); in being made in the image of God (according to Genesis 1 and to some hadith).13 Although we have been given the ability to shape and to configure our world in various ways, both physically and spiritually – and this is what we commonly call ‘creativity’ – we are not creators in an absolute sense. Bible and Qur’an both limit the use of the verb ‘to create’ to God alone. Our dignity is to be muṣawwirūn – those who can shape and give form to things that already have their existence, as we have ours, from the Creator. More to the point, it is our dignity that we are the only creatures on earth who are able to exercise this kind of reflective and innovative, albeit derivative, creativity. Yet within this dignity of being muṣawwirūn – creative creatures – there exists an inherent tension that makes it difficult to manage. We repeatedly try to dissolve the createdness-creativity tension by choosing one or other pole of it. We either seek a greater dignity – an autonomy apart from God and a god-like dominance over the rest of creation – or, on the other hand, we decline that dignity and also the responsibility it carries, and prefer to live as though we had not been given a share in God’s shaping of the world. Each person experiences this tension in herself or himself and recognises that it is of the nature of being human; it goes to our very origins – it is ‘original’ in that sense. Notice that there is no external force of evil at the origin, only a free decision by human beings to decline the relationship God offers, and to mistrust God’s intentions for us. This mistrust is strange, and the accounts in Genesis underline it: humans are said to be made ‘in [God’s] image and after [God’s] likeness’ (Gen 1:26), and yet the serpent promises them that, if they eat the fruit, they will be ‘like God’ (Gen 3:5). Their choice amounts to an act of despair: they have lost hope in who they really are by God’s gift, and decide they must seek their own way to be like God. It is here that we come to the second criticism. 2. The charge that too much is made of the single transgression of Adam and his wife – such a small matter could not have had lasting consequences for all their offspring If the sin of the first humans were simply an historical event of two people’s disobedience against one of God’s prohibitions, then indeed it would make little 13  For a discussion of the hadiths speaking about God’s having created Adam in His image, see Christopher Melchert, “God Created Adam in His Image”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 13/1 (2011), pp. 113–24.

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sense to imagine that it has such global repercussions. However, as I pointed out in the methodological matters above, the starting point of the teaching on original sin is not the biblical witness but reflection on human experience. We can say that the biblical accounts in Genesis represent, as Karl Rahner would put it ‘an aetiological inference from the experience of man’s existential situation in the history of salvation to what must have happened “at the beginning” if the present situation of freedom actually is the way it is experienced’.14 The Adam and Eve story is not an eyewitness account, but a narrative that projects back to the very beginning of human decision-making a truth we sense about our own humanity in relationship to God. The account itself signals to us that it is not an event in the realm of history – the knowledge of good and evil does not grow on trees (Gen 2:9); snakes do not talk (Gen 3:1); God does not walk in gardens in the cool of evening (Gen 3:8). Nor does the account explain the origin of sin: rather it dramatises it. It offers no theory as to why Adam and Eve would trust the words of the talking snake over the word of the God who created and blessed them, yet this is what it shows them doing. They are only too ready to believe that God is trying to keep them from having a clear vision of things and a higher dignity than that they already enjoy. The serpent easily convinces them that God is not to be trusted: eating the forbidden fruit will not be the death of them; on the contrary, it will open their eyes and they could actually be like God, determining (literally, ‘knowing’) good and evil (Gen 3:5). What they have rejected – what humanity senses it has rejected – is that peaceful relationship with God, that acceptance of God’s selfcommunication,15 quaintly expressed by the image of walking together in the garden (Gen 3:8). They (we) have chosen rivalry over communion. When they are confronted with what they have chosen, they take another tack: they abandon even the dignity they had, and claim merely to have been unwitting pawns – the man in the hands of the woman; the woman in the hands of the serpent (Gen 3:12–13). Many Muslim interpreters have wanted to minimise the significance of the sin of Adam and his wife, not least because of a gradually developing orthodoxy about the impeccability (ʿiṣma) of prophets, and the identification of Adam, perhaps surprisingly, as a prophet.16 The emerging commitment to the notion of the impeccability of Muhammad was seen to need to embrace also his precursor prophets in order to be coherent. This meant that God’s warning to Adam about  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 114. Foundations, p. 114. 16 There is a great deal of popular literature on the impeccability of prophets, even though it is difficult to square with so many explicit statements in the Qur’an. On the emergence of this orthodoxy, see Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy. The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, in particular pp. 278–80 with regard to pre-Islamic prophets as typological pre-figurements of Muhammad. 14

15 Rahner,

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the tree must only have been advice rather command; what the Qur’an calls Adam’s disobedience and error must really just have been a failure to take appropriate advice; what the Qur’an calls his repentance could not have been repentance from sin, because the Garden is not a place of testing that could result in sin; and so on. Nonetheless, if we read the text without the prior commitment to a doctrine of impeccability, there are various elements in the Qur’an’s multiple recountings of the story that point to an awareness of the momentous nature of this first recounted human exercise of freedom.17 a) Iblīs and arrogance The sin of Adam is spoken of as a ‘slip’ (Q 2:36). Humans are found forgetful and lacking in constancy (Q 20:115) and their lapse is followed immediately by repentance and forgiveness. However, the event is always linked in the Qur’an with the influence of Iblīs. Perhaps we should say that Iblīs’ sin of arrogance (istikbār – literally, considering oneself greater) is the first sin recorded, though he is not identified as human. Nonetheless, the arrogance that Iblīs demonstrated in his refusal to obey God and show respect for the newly-created human being (Q 7:12–17 and parallels) is precisely the attitude that the Qur’an considers as fundamental to human sinfulness. In fact, unbelief (kufr), ‘as man’s denial of the Creator, manifests itself most characteristically in various acts of insolence, haughtiness, and presumptuousness’.18 The Qur’an returns repeatedly to the figure of Pharaoh – his name occurs seventy-four times – and he becomes the archetypal enemy of God and humanity precisely in his arrogance – declaring himself to be his people’s High Lord (Q 79:15–24; see also Q 26:24–29).19 b) Iblīs’s whispering to Adam is recounted in two separate verses, tempting in slightly different ways: Satan whispered to the two of them so as to expose their nakedness, which had been hidden from them, and he said: ‘Your Lord only forbade you this tree so that you would not become angels nor become of the immortals.’ (Q 7:20) Satan whispered to him ‘Adam, shall I show you the tree of immortality and of a sovereignty that never decays?’ (Q 20:120)20 17  Perhaps the covenant event of a-lastu bi-Rabbikum (Q 7:172) should be considered the first act of human freedom. However, the Qur’an presents that primordial event, where God asks all humanity to bear witness that He is their Lord, as a prehistoric witness of faith that can be used against those who at the judgement would claim not to be responsible for their failures to acknowledge the authority of God. 18  Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’ān, Montreal: McGill University Press, 1966, p. 120. 19  Furthermore, Pharaoh leads his people into arrogance (for example, Q 20:79; 23:46). 20  Note the occurrence in the two verses of the root m-l-k. In Q 7:20 it is presumed to relate to angels, though Tafsīr al-Jalālayn notes that it can be read differently as malikayn ‘kings’. In Q 20:120 it is the abstract noun mulk – power, authority, possession.

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These temptations are perhaps a little less strong than the suggestion of the serpent in Genesis 3:5 that, if they were to eat the fruit of the tree, Adam and Eve would become like God, knowing (that is, determining) what is good and evil. Nonetheless, Iblīs’ offer in the Qur’an, and the newly-created humans’ desire for it, are strikingly similar. Immortality and eternal sovereignty (mulk) are presented as being within reach, and God is said to be trying to keep us humans from them. The act of Adam and his wife in the Qur’an is, in my view, no less than in Genesis, a choice to see God as a rival and to seek autonomy from God in an immortality and a lasting sovereignty that are not gifts of God but something of which they have tried to take possession.21 Although many commentators will minimise Adam’s sin, the stated motivations for that transgression are anything but trivial. 3. The questioning of any hereditary or social understanding of sin and guilt, with a concomitant stress on individual responsibility and culpability The Islamic tradition is certainly right to insist that one person’s act of disobedience is not to be imputed to another. If the story of the first parents were simply such a personal act, then there would be no reason to think it affects my moral status or yours, and this is a point where Christian theology needs to make more careful distinctions than it often does. Rahner is clear on this point: ‘Original sin in the Christian sense in no way implies that the original, personal act of freedom of the first person or persons is transmitted to us as our moral quality.’22 We rightly recoil from the idea that each newborn begins life with the personal moral status of a sinner, already carrying a debt incurred by her forebears. At the same time, however, it is almost impossible to conceive of a human being whose own freedom is not constrained in some way right from the beginning by the history and culture of sin into which she is born. The Islamic tradition, on the other hand, can be said to strongly insist on individual responsibility for wrongdoing and the impossibility of bearing another’s burden. ‘Whoever accepts guidance does so for his own good; whoever strays does so at his own

21  Note how this is echoed in the important Christological hymn of Philippians 2:5–11. In the garden, humans reach out to grasp what will make them ‘like God.’ Christ Jesus, says Paul, did not think that his identity with God was something to be grasped for himself (harpagmon). 22 He continues: ‘In Original Sin the sin of Adam is not imputed to us. Personal guilt from an original act of freedom cannot be transmitted, for it is the existential “no” of personal transcendence towards God or against him. And by its very nature this cannot be transmitted, just as the formal freedom of a subject cannot be transmitted. […] For Catholic theology, therefore, original sin in no way means that the moral quality of the actions of the first person or persons is transmitted to us, whether this be through juridical imputation by God or through some kind of biological heredity, however conceived’. Rahner, Foundations, p. 111.

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peril. No soul will bear another’s burden, nor do We punish until We have sent a messenger’ (Q 17:15).23 However, even if one accepts the importance of individual responsibility, frank reflection on our human experience leads us to recognise that even what may seem our freest choices take place in an atmosphere and a history that has already long been marked by a rejection of God’s offer, and that the range of our choices and even our understanding of those choices is conditioned by our insertion in a human community. Our freedom is not ours alone in isolation from other human beings. In his Political Theory of Islam, the Indo-Pakistani thinker Abul Aʿla Maududi describes the human predicament in ways that would be recognizable to someone holding a belief in original sin as we have been outlining it: the refusal of humanity to recognise its createdness, and its preferring to be like God: The pleasure of posing as a God is more enchanting and appealing than anything else that man has yet been able to discover […]. The root cause of all evil and mischief in the world is the domination of man over man, be it direct or indirect. This was the origin of all the troubles of mankind and even to this day it remains the main cause of all the misfortunes and vices which have brought untold misery on the teeming humanity.24

The desire to lord it over creation rather than to recognise our own creatureliness is the essence of human sin, and Maududi proposes that prophecy has always offered the cure for this, the warning to acknowledge only one Lord: The only remedy for this dreadful malady lies in the repudiation and renunciation by man of all masters and in the explicit recognition by him [of ] God Almighty as his sole master and lord (ilah and rabb). There is no way to salvation except this; for even if he were to become an atheist, he would not be able to shake himself free of all these masters (ilahs and rabbs).25

Although Maududi is surely right in his diagnosis of the fundamental human ill – the human desire to be god – he does not take full account of the extent to which such a desire conditions not only those who wield quasi-divine power, but also the very cultural, political and economic structures they control, in which we are all immersed and by which we are shaped. That is to say, everyone is involved in this deformation of our humanity, not just those in power. Again we find elements in the Qur’anic accounts that might suggest that the sin of Adam and his wife goes beyond their personal transgression and involves humanity more broadly:

 See also Q 6:164; 10:108; 35:18; 53:38.  Sayed Abul Aʿla Maududi, The Political Theory of Islam, Lahore: Islamic Publications Limited, 1968, pp. 8–13. Italics in the original. 25  Maududi, Political Theory, p. 15. 23 24

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a) Adam and his wife understand that they have wronged themselves. Yet they are the first-created selves from which all other selves come. They pray ‘Our Lord, we have wronged our souls (or ‘our selves’, anfusanā): if You do not forgive us and have mercy, we shall assuredly be among the losers.’ (Q 7:23) The idea of sin as ẓulm al-nafs (wronging the self or the soul) is often appealed to in order to sustain an idea of isolated individual responsibility for sin. Yet, in the case of Adam and his wife, the term nafs is freighted with meaning. After all God has created humanity from a single soul or self (nafs): O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord, who created you from a single soul (min nafsin wāḥida) and from it created its mate (zawj) and from those two has spread abroad a multitude of men and women (Q 4:1).

Adam and his zawj are not just any souls or selves; they are the selves at the origin of all selves and those selves have been wronged. God’s mercy and forgiveness – like everything divine – are eternal and unchanging, but it becomes clear as the Qur’anic narrative continues that the history of human selves is filled with arrogance, with rejection, with ẓulm against God and God’s creatures. The Qur’an unmistakably depicts the origins of human history as marked by disobedience to God, and such disobedience is seen not only as an individual failing on the part of Adam and Eve: it was provoked by the bitterness of Iblīs, who had already been condemned for his arrogance in disobeying God and is to be expelled from the divine presence; and it has its sequel in Cain’s murder of his brother (Q 5:27–32). b) It is difficult to read the expulsion from the Garden in any way but as a punishment – a distancing from God and a mutual enmity that affects all human beings. The same verb is used in banishing Adam and his wife as was used to banish Iblīs: uhbiṭū / uhbiṭā / uhbiṭ. In response to Adam’s prayer for forgiveness God replies, ‘A ll of you get out (uhbiṭū)! You are each other’s enemies. On earth you will have a place to stay and livelihood – for a time. There you will live; there you will die; from there you will be brought out’ (Q 7:24–25). Commentators argue that, since God’s explicit intention in creating human beings was that they should live on earth, the expulsion from the Garden was perhaps not as punitive as it might seem; it was, they maintain, the expected sending to earth of the vicegerent God had created. However, explanations that dissociate the disobedience from the expulsion often seem deliberately aimed at minimising the significance of the disobedience of Adam and his wife by suggesting that there was no punishment, only immediate forgiveness.

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c) There is said to be an original pure nature according to which God created humanity. Whatever nature this is, it is shared by all. So set your face firmly towards religion as a person of pure faith (ḥanīfan), consonant with nature (fiṭra) according to which God created (faṭara) mankind – there is no altering God’s creation. That is the right religion, though most people do not realise it. (Q 30:30)

It may well be that our original nature was innocent and not prone to sin or evil.26 It may be the case that human beings were created with a natural tendency towards the recognition of the One God. However, it is clear even from the Qur’anic narrative that human nature was from the very first moment capable of arrogant disobedience and everything that follows from that. This is so not because human nature was defectively made, but because its very dignity and capabilities made possible – perhaps even made likely – a sense of rivalry with the Creator. This is what the Christian doctrine of original sin recognises. Some say that human sin is only the result of forgetting one’s true fiṭra, that the fiṭra itself remains pristine and unaffected.27 However, it is difficult to see how fundamental to humanity this God-given nature could be if it can simply be forgotten. If the fiṭra of the human being is, as we have suggested above, a combination of both creativity and creatureliness – both of them God-given goods – sinfulness would not involve so much a forgetting of one’s nature, but rather an inability to handle the tension inherent in being at the same time both creative and created. In the traditions, the notion of fiṭra is often identified with the ‘natural religion’ of Islam. In a hadith existing in several versions, Muhammad is quoted as saying ‘No baby is born without being in the natural state (fiṭra). It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a polytheist.’28 Even if we accept that the fiṭra according to which God created humanity is principally a religious disposition, then according to this hadith one is apparently able to act against that innate disposition because of social context and pressure. Therefore, the fiṭra cannot be understood as a guarantee against inheriting the errors into which our forebears have fallen, nor against an almost ‘congenital’ involvement in structures of sin.29 26  For a helpful description of the various ways this is conceived in Islamic tradition, see Yasien Mohamed, “The Interpretations of Fiṭrah”, Islamic Studies, 34/2 (1995), pp. 129–51. A more extensive treatment of some key thinkers is available in Ovamir Anjum, Politics, law, and community in Islamic thought. The Taymiyyan moment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 27 See, for example, Şaban Ali Düzgün, “The Capabilities Embedded in to the Human Nature/Fitra”, Journal of Islamic Research, 27/3 (2016), pp. 213–9: ‘In this context fiṭra is maximally great – so perfect and splendid that nothing greater is conceivable than it. It is the criterion according to which other criteria of life should be evaluated and checked.’ 28  Various forms of this hadith are recorded in Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, “al-qadr”, 6423–6429. 29  Human obstinacy in following the errors of the forebears is a recurrent refrain in the Qur’an. See Q 2:170; 7:28; 7:70–1; 11:62, 87; 14:10; 21:53–4; 26:74–6; 31:21; 34:43; 37:69–70; 43:22–3.

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d) Inna l-nafs la-ammāra bi-l-sūʾ (Q 12:53) Yūsuf, one of the Qur’an’s great heroes, acknowledges the proneness – even more than the proneness, the driving, the urging – of the soul towards evil. He refuses to absolve himself for the almost-consummated act of adultery with Zulaykha. This is quite an admission, though the tradition tends to soften the impact by taking three references to the nafs in the Qur’an  – al-nafs la-ammāra bi-l-sūʾ (the soul commands to evil, Q 12:53); al-nafs al-lawwāma (the reproaching soul, Q 75:2) and al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna (the contented soul, Q 89:27) – and developing from those hints a typology of souls and states of soul that relativises the self ’s urging towards evil, and makes it seem temporary or occasional. However, Yūsuf ’s statement was more categorical. He did not speak of the soul insistently commanding to evil as though it were one of the souls, or a temporary state. Rather he seems to make a general statement about the soul or self: I do not absolve myself, for surely the soul is such as commands insistently to evil, and were it not for the mercy that my Lord has exercised ….30 My Lord is forgiving and merciful. (Q 12:53)

Yūsuf expresses the perplexity and shame that all human beings experience – that there is something in us, profound enough to be called the self or the soul, which is at odds with the will of the Creator. We are here reminded of mujāhadat alnafs – the struggle against the self, which is said to be a greater jihād than fighting ‘in the way of God’. This notion represents a broad recognition within the Islamic tradition that the human nafs as we actually experience it – as distinct from how God may have created it – is not fundamentally aligned with the will of God, nor perhaps with our own divinely-guided desires. This is the experience that lies at the heart of the affirmation of original sin. 4. The affirmation that, like human transgression, divine forgiveness is a relatively straightforward matter. Forgiveness is a free act of divine sovereignty, costing God little, and so there is no need for a saviour to effect for human beings something we are unable to do for ourselves. Adam says in the Qur’an, ‘If you do not forgive us and exercise mercy, we are assuredly among the losers’ (Q 7:23). He recognises as Yūsuf does that there is indeed something we cannot do for ourselves. Only God’s mercy and forgiveness can bring about a reconciliation with those who through arrogant confidence 30 Yūsuf ’s statement trails off here, making reference to what had already been said in Q 12:24: ‘She desired him, and he desired her; had he not seen the evidence of his Lord […]’. Early Qur’an commentators are quite graphic in their descriptions of how close they were to consummating their desires. See, for example, Fudge’s account of al-Ṭabrisī’s discussion in Bruce Fudge, Qur’ānic Hermeneutics. Al-Ṭabrisī and the Craft of Commentary, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 103–7.

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in their own will and autonomy have adopted a rivalrous attitude towards God. In the Qur’anic narrative, Adam’s immediate repentance is met with an equally speedy forgiveness, and the account is considered settled. Polemicists ask why, if Adam repented and God accepted that act, there was any need for an atonement at all, at any price, let alone at the cost of an innocent life.31 This is a fair question and so a key issue for any understanding of atonement. Two aspects of it need to be addressed. First, if the sin of Adam and Eve were simply the transgressing of a particular and perhaps even quite arbitrary divine prohibition, then it would be right to wonder why it is considered so catastrophic. However, what is being portrayed in mythical form in the Adam and Eve story is, in the Christian reading of the text, not simply a minor infraction against God’s command, but rather the human rejection of God’s free and loving self-communication. Even in the Qur’an’s account of the event, this ‘slip’ is tied, as we have seen, to the desire for immortality and eternal sovereignty (Q 20:120). Second, it is essential to affirm that the reconciliation Christians perceive to have been effected in Christ is the act of God, not the act of a ‘someone else’ doing God’s dirty-work for him. Christians must acknowledge that careless language on this matter can indeed make it seem as though God is somehow locked into a mechanism whereby God requires someone other than God’s self to achieve a reconciliation. There can never be a condition or a process that locks God in. The only thing that could be said to condition God is God’s being true to His own nature. Reconciliation in Christ is a free act of God – God freely acting out God’s nature as merciful and self-giving. The mutual self-giving of the Father, the Son and the Spirit is, of course, an eternal interrelation. However, in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ humanity is fully drawn into this action and relation of mutual self-giving. Here at last, Christians would say, is a human life lived completely according to the fiṭra (nature) God intended; here at last is one who does not treat God as a rival; who resonates completely and seamlessly with the Word through which all is created (Jn 1:3); who does ‘not consider equality with God something to be exploited for himself ’ (Phil 2:6); who does not feel he has to keep something for himself, but who in his living (and even in his dying) gives himself fully to expressing in his flesh and blood what God wants to express through him. Much talk about atonement makes it seem to Muslim interlocutors – indeed, to any interlocutor – as though something is being done for God, or as though God needs something to be done in order to ‘get over’ His wrath and satisfy His wounded sense of honour. This is certainly one of the flaws in the many ex31  See, for example, al-Qarāfī’s al-Ajwiba al-fākhira recounted in Diego Sarrió Cucarella, Muslim-Christian Polemics Across the Mediterranean. The Splendid Replies of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285), Leiden: Brill, 2015, p. 207.

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planations that follow Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), who will be discussed further below. On the contrary, as the Nicene Creed puts it, God is doing something ‘for us human beings and for our salvation’. As Christian faith would see it, in Christ there is now a renewed possibility of peace with God for every human person, if we choose to enter it, if we allow ourselves to be drawn by the spirit of God into that humanity that fully embodies what it is to be divine. 5. The criticism that the supposed mechanism of redemption by the death of Jesus would only seem to deepen sinfulness rather than heal it.32 It is sometimes asked why, if the death of an innocent person were required to balance the sin of Adam, the death of his son Abel would not have sufficed?33 Suggestions like this alert Christian theologians, perhaps, to how much talk about atonement suggests that this is an elaborate accounting procedure, a balancing of the books. Even if it were such, Muslims understandably ask why the killing of Jesus is thought not to have marked the definitive break between humanity and God – a final bankruptcy, if you like – but rather is believed to have somehow made up the age-old ‘deficit’ caused by the sin of the first humans by bailing them out with a massive injection of moral ‘capital.’ It needs to be kept quite clear that what is at issue in the doctrine of the atonement is not a demand on God’s part for the death of anyone. The death of Jesus was willed and carried out by human beings who could not bear and would not hear what he as God’s Word was expressing. What God willed and what God himself carried out was the enactment in a human life of the very nature of God. It was not Jesus’ killing that God willed, but his complete faithfulness to expressing mercy and compassion even when it was clear it would almost certainly lead to his death. It makes little sense to say that God willed the murderous rejection of His Word, as critics rightly point out. 6. The objection that the Cross would seem to demonstrate the weakness rather than the power of God, who is inexplicably unable to save humanity without this counter-intuitive manoeuvre. The renowned Egyptian modernist thinker Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) accuses Christian missionary publications in his country of claiming that salvation from sin in the afterlife, and eternal life in the heavens, are only obtainable through the belief that God found no way to save mankind from the sin of his father Adam 32 These further objections and criticisms will have to be dealt with more briefly here. However, they will be discussed at more length in another essay. Daniel A. Madigan, “Who Needs It? Atonement in Muslim-Christian Theological Engagement”, Atonement and Comparative Theology. The Cross in Dialogue with Other Religions, ed. Catherine Cornille, New York: Fordham University Press, 2021, pp. 11–39. 33  Sarriò Cucarella, Muslim-Christian Polemics, pp. 207–8.

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except by becoming incarnate in a human body, empowering over himself a group that was the most superior of peoples, their crucifixion of Him, and His becoming cursed by the ruling of the divine law and shariʿa!34

Put this way, of course, it does seem ridiculous. Riḍā’ has put his finger on a weakness in several Christian theories of sin and atonement, particularly those, whether Catholic or Protestant, that take their lead from Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109).35 What characterises these theories is their insistence that the obstacle to God’s forgiving of human sin lies somehow in God. Because of God’s justice, or honour, or goodness, God is actually unable to cancel the debt incurred by human sin. Human salvation, in Anselm’s understanding, could not have been brought about unless humanity repaid what we owed to God.36 Here is yet another case in which classic Muslim critiques of Christianity identify a weakness in some Christian positions, a weakness that Christian theologians themselves come to acknowledge – not usually because of the Muslim critique, but because of the continual development of theology as reflection on the Gospel. Even though for centuries Anselm has shaped Christian thinking about the nature of sin and the role of the Cross of Christ in dealing with it, a Catholic theologian like Eleonore Stump can argue from well within the tradition that Anselm’s kind of interpretation of the atonement is irremediably flawed and cannot be salvaged.37 AlFaruqi and Rashid Riḍā would surely agree with her! The incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus are not a pre-condition for God’s exercise of mercy. Rather, they are the exercise of that mercy and its fullest expression. 7. The criticism that the Christian understanding of salvation short-circuits the moral task and responsibility of the human person and leads to an arrogant complacency about one’s ultimate fate, and to a passivity in the face of the world’s needs. This could be the most serious charge against many Christian understandings of salvation, and the point is well taken. Again al-Faruqi puts it starkly and repeatedly in his writings, pointing out that the kind of already-accomplished salvation envisaged by too many Christians undervalues the world and our ethical life in

34  Translation from Simon Wood, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs. Rashīd Riḍā’s Modernist Defence of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld, 2008, p. 137. 35  Eleonore Stump, Atonement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 21–3 and passim. 36 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, particularly book II, chapters 6–7. Anselm of Canterbury, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson, Minneapolis MN: A. J. Banning Press, 2000. 37  Not all the current critiques of Anselm are as carefully thought through as that by Stump, Atonement, pp. 23–27; 71–112. See also Elizabeth Johnson, Creation and the Cross. The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril, Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 2018.

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it.38 Human beings, in this way of seeing things, are not agents charged with responsibility by the Creator, but rather puppets in some bizarre divine drama. More problematically, they become ethically complacent and self-righteous.39 Al-Faruqi’s critique is reminiscent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s scathing dismissal of ‘cheap grace’.40 Christians do have a case to answer when it comes to taking seriously the moral task of the believer and the relationship of ethical action to salvation. This is particularly so with Anselmian understandings of atonement, where the entire burden of obedience and faithfulness falls on Jesus and is imputed to others in what can look like a simple accounting transaction. Thomistic approaches, however, recognise the importance of human ethical cooperation with divine grace, not simply as a satisfaction owed to God, but with a strong sense of the transformation that is needed to deal with human guilt and shame, and to reestablish the bonds of human community ruptured by sin.41

Conclusion Consideration of these seven quite forceful Muslim criticisms of the doctrine of original sin and of the atonement that Christians believe God is effecting in Christ has highlighted a number of areas where the critique is often justified: the excessive pessimism about God’s good creation; the facile notions of an inherited moral status; the positing of some incapacity on God’s part to forgive without an elaborate mechanism to supposedly resolve a debt of honour; the understanding of salvation as a fait accompli that absolves humanity from any further ethical struggle. It has also been shown that diversity of opinion on these key theological questions does not simply divide along confessional lines. Christian theologians would share some of the same reservations Muslims express about ways of understanding these teachings. Similarly, some Muslim thinkers recognise well enough the concerns that Christian thinkers bring to questions of theological anthropology and soteriology: as theologians we all have to grapple with the origins of human sin; we all have the experience of being immersed in cultures and civilizations in which human sin is so deeply ingrained as to be almost inescapable; we all agree that God takes sin seriously. At the same time, as people who claim to believe in a God whose self-definition rests centrally on

38  Isma’il R. al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity. Prospects for Dialogue”, Sacred Heart Messenger, 102/9 (1967), pp. 29–33, at p. 33; cited in Fletcher, Ismaʿīl al-Faruqi, p. 188. 39  al-Faruqi, Christian Ethics, p. 236. See also Isma’il R. al-Faruqi, “On The Raison d’Être of the Ummah”, Islamic Studies, 2/2 (1963), pp. 159–203. 40  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, New York NY: Touchstone, 1995, pp. 43–5. 41  For an excellent treatment of this, see Stump, Atonement, pp. 39–70.

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mercy (Qur’an 6:54; Exodus 34:6), we are necessarily faced with the question of how the two realities of mercy and sin are to be understood in relationship. We clearly differ about where and in what way the merciful God has acted decisively in history to deal with our alienation. For both traditions God deals with human sinfulness through the divine Word. In one case, it is understood to be through God’s word of clear warning, reminder and guidance in the history of prophecy culminating in the Qur’an, which delineates and smooths the path of faithful obedience. In the other, God deals with sin by bearing it in a humble identification with humanity through the Word incarnate, who himself has become the space of at-one-ment, the place where, as the Qur’an might put it, ‘God is pleased with them and they are pleased with God’ (Q 58:22; 9:100). There is clearly much more to be explored in our theological engagement, as we try to move beyond the shallow caricatures of each other’s positions that have fuelled centuries of polemics.

Bibliography Adams, Charles J., “Islam and Christianity. The Opposition of Similarities”, Logos Islamikos. Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis Wickens, ed. Roger M. Savory and Dionisius A. Agius, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984, pp. 287– 306. Ahmed, Shahab, Before Orthodoxy. The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Anjum, Ovamir, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought. The Taymiyyan Moment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Anselm of Canterbury, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson, Minneapolis MN: A. J. Banning Press, 2000. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship, New York NY: Touchstone, 1995. Düzgün, Şaban Ali, “The Capabilities Embedded in to the Human Nature/Fitra”, Journal of Islamic Research, 27/3 (2016), pp. 213–9. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, Christian Ethics. A Historical and Systematic Analysis of its Dominant Ideas, Montreal: McGill, 1986. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, Islam and Other Faiths, ed. Ataullah Siddiqui, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1998. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, “Islam and Christianity. Diatribe or Dialogue”, repr. in al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths, pp. 241–80. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, “Islam and Christianity. Prospects for Dialogue”, Sacred Heart Messenger, 102/9 (1967), pp. 29–33. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, “On the Nature of Islamic Daʿwah”, International Review of Missions, 65/260 (1976), pp. 391–406. Faruqi, Ismail Raji al-, “On the Raison d’Être of the Ummah”, Islamic Studies, 2/2 (1963), pp. 159–203.

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Fletcher, Charles D., Ismaʿīl al-Faruqi (1921–1986) and Inter-Faith Dialogue. The Man, The Scholar, The Participant, PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2008. Fletcher, Charles D., Muslim-Christian Engagement in the Twentieth Century. The Principles of Interfaith Dialogue and the Work of Ismaʻil Al-Faruqi. London: I. B. Tauris: 2015. Fudge, Bruce, Qur’ānic Hermeneutics. Al-Ṭabrisī and the Craft of Commentary, London: Routledge, 2011. Izutsu, Toshihiko, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’ān, Montreal: McGill University Press, 1966. Johnson, Elizabeth, Creation and the Cross. The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril, Mary­ knoll NY: Orbis, 2018. Louth, Andrew, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, Downer’s Grove IL: Intervarsity Press, 2013. Madigan, Daniel A., “Who Needs It? Atonement in Muslim-Christian Theological Engagement”, Atonement and Comparative Theology. The Cross in Dialogue with Other Religions, ed. Catherine Cornille, New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2021, pp. 11–39. Maḥallī, Jalāl al-Dīn al-, and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, trans. Feras Hamza, Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2008. Maududi, Sayed Abul Aʿla, The Political Theory of Islam, Lahore: Islamic Publications Limited, 1968. Melchert, Christopher, “God Created Adam in His Image”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 13/1 (2011), pp. 113–24. Mohamed, Yasien, “The Interpretations of Fiṭrah”, Islamic Studies, 34/2 (1995), pp. 129–51. Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, New York NY: Crossroad, 1978. Riḍā, Muḥammad Rashīd, and Simon Wood, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs. Rashīd Riḍā’s Modernist Defence of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Saeed, Abdullah, Reading the Qur’ān in the Twenty-first Century. A Contextualist Approach, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Sarrió Cucarella, Diego, Muslim-Christian Polemics Across the Mediterranean. The Splendid Replies of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285), Leiden: Brill, 2015. Stump, Eleonore, Atonement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

The ‘Fall’ of Mankind Structural Parallels between the Narratives of Sin in Christianity and Islam R alf K. Wüstenberg1 There are unmistakable parallels between the Christian and Islamic understandings of sin. These include the theme of recognition (self-knowledge and knowledge of God), and the content of sin (alienation, lack of faith and disobedience) as well as the result of the Fall (banishment from paradise), and God’s reaction (forgiveness, mercy). Nevertheless, despite structurally impressive parallels they are – from the point of view of content – different from each other. In the following I will proceed in three steps. First, I will recall both the Biblical and the Qur’anic narratives of the ‘Fall’. Secondly, I will analyse the structural parallels alongside four elements, namely the content of sin, God’s reaction to sin, the importance of repentance, and finally, the consequences of the Fall for mankind. In the last part, I will share thoughts on the differences and commonalities evaluated in light of the theology of Christian Reformers such as Luther and Calvin.

Narratives of the ‘Fall’ in Qur’an and Bible Parallels to the Biblical narrative of the Fall (Genesis 3) are evident when considering the overall Qur’anic narrative, for example, according to Sura al-Baqara. Similar to the first book of the Bible, Q 2:35 describes how Adam and his wife were walking in the Garden where they were invited to stay and allowed to eat from all trees, except for one: ‘And We said: Adam, stay, you and your wife – in the Garden. And eat unrestrictedly from them, but do not go near this one tree. Otherwise, you will be evildoers.’2 Similar to that of the Biblical story of the Fall, this passage has to do with seduction. However, in the Qur’an it is not the snake  English translation of this paper by Randi Lundell.  The corresponding passage in Genesis 3:8, 16, 17 reads: ‘Now the Lord had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there He put the man He had formed […] And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.’ 1 2

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who tempts but Satan. According to Q 2:34, Iblīs was the only being (himself a jinn or spirit) who did not bow down before Adam. The offence lies in a mistaken idea of the order of rank before God: Iblīs did not acknowledge that God had given Adam knowledge, something that the angels did not possess, and which thus placed him even above the angels. In both versions, the prohibition is the central point: not to eat from a particular tree. ‘But Satan succeeded in misleading them and brought them away from where they were’ (Q 2:36). Parallel to Genesis (3:25 and 3:15) the first results of sin are described: banishment from paradise (on the earth) and conflict: ‘And We said: Go away! You are each other’s enemies. The earth will be your dwelling place and at your disposal only for a time’ (Q 2:36). Both religious versions are, in terms of content ‘similarly congruent’.3 The Qur’an and Bible both agree that mankind is not in a position to turn to God all on its own. After mankind has defied God’s commandment, it lacks full knowledge to do what is right. According to a Muslim interpretation, man needs guidance. After man turns away from God, He subsequently turns to man: forgiveness and mercy are, in Islam, God’s answer to the sins of men. ‘Then Adam received some words from his Lord, and He relented towards him’ (Q 2:37). He is thus the forgiven one, the one who has turned back again and the one who receives mercy.4 In this verse we see a doubleturning: firstly, Adam does not remain alone in sin, indeed he receives a word from God and man turns toward it. God reveals Himself as forgiving, attentive, and merciful. In the Qur’an, the turning of God toward man is thus understood in the sense of a promise of guidance: God addresses all of the Garden and promises to give guidance (Q 2:38); whoever heeds His guidance does not need to worry (Q 2:39). The key to the idea is included here, ‘Remember My mercy, that I have shown to you’ (Q 2:40) and the content of that remembering includes repentance.

Structural Parallels between Both Narratives and their Interpretation in Islam and Christianity There is evidence for structural parallels between a Qur’anic and a Biblical understanding of sin, namely: 1. as to the content of sin (alienation, lack of faith and disobedience) 2. according to God’s reaction (forgiveness and mercy) 3. concerning the conditions for God’s reaction (belief and repentance) 4. finally, with regard to the consequences of the ‘Fall’ (banishment from paradise) 3  See Bertram Schmitz, Der Koran. Sura 2 “Die Kuh”. Ein religionshistorischer Kommentar, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 2009, p. 64: ‘Inhaltlich ist die Baqarastelle mit Genesis deckungsgleich.’ 4 As a Biblical parallel, the birth of the first child in Genesis 4:1 can be interpreted in the sense of God’s (re)turning. ‘With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.’

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Firstly, in relation to the content of sin, according to the Qur’an, sin very clearly means to ‘deviate’, as well as in its more rigorous tone, ‘to declare Our signs to be lies’ (Q 2:39). Sin means not to recognise something as pertaining to faith, in a practical or spiritual sense.5 Wherever divine signs are therefore discerned as ‘lies’, then ‘deception’ replaces ‘truth’ (Q 2:42). There is a striking parallel in the New Testament. In the letter to the Romans, Paul uses a similar image for twisting God’s truth: ‘They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised’ (Rom 1:25). In short, God’s truth is the recognition that God is God and man is man. Sin means refusing to appreciate this fundamental difference. God is then no longer the Lord of life, but man pretends to be Lord and thus clear, unequivocal obedience to the Lord of life is denied. The resulting conduct of man is not devotion to God, but self-elevation (sin). Alienation, lack of faith and disobedience are then the result of failing to remember God. Yet happiness, peace and blessedness find those who commemorate God. In this regard, there is the rhetorical question in Q 13:28: ‘Doesn’t the heart find peace in commemorating God?’ There are different ways by which God brings man to the act of divine commemoration: the Qur’an itself is actually described as a ‘re-collector’ or ‘admonisher’ for God.6 Thus, these related signs of God (āyāt) lead to remembering in a double sense: as a sign of God in creation and as a letter in the verses of the Qur’an. Regarding this double-meaning, Q 18:57 reads: ‘Who is more foolish than the person who, having the signs of commemoration of the Lord, turns away from Him and forgets Him?’ Finally, God’s creation is a reason to remember Him and commemorate Him. Hence the instruction: ‘Don’t you see that God sends the rain from the heavens, conveys it to the earth and then causes crops of different colours to grow? Then they dry out and you see them become yellow, then He makes them chaff. See, in this is truly an admonition for those of you who have understanding’ (Q 39:21). Secondly, is the matter of God’s reaction to sin: mercy and forgiveness. The overcoming of sin through God’s mercy is determined in Islam as it is in Christianity, but there is evidence that the idea of mercy has a different connotation. Mercy is primarily God’s ‘guidance’ (Q 2:38), or leading to the right path. The difference between guidance and salvation is occasionally overemphasised in interreligious literature and the argument made: ‘Since a person in Islam is not ruined 5 In part paraphrase from Schmitz’s commentary; see for this interpretation of V. 39 Betram Schmitz, Der Koran, p. 67, the German text reads: ‘In 39 A wie B geht es demnach darum, etwas nicht anzuerkennen, es als unwahr zu erklären und zwar im existentiellen, den Glauben betreffenden, praktischen oder gesitigen Sinn’. 6  In cross-reference to Q 43:5; 11:120 and 6:70. See Angelika Brodersen, “Remembrance”, The Encylopaedia of the Qur’ān, Leiden: Brill, 1995, vol. 8, pp. 419–24, at p. 422 argues: ‘For the Qu’ran is singled out as a means of warning humankind against the consequences of overlooking God’.

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through the Fall, he doesn’t need salvation, but rather guidance.’7 Certainly, the difference between Islam and Christianity must also be described in relation to the Fall, which will be discussed shortly. However, the desire to see a contrast whereby Islam is a religion of law and Christianity is a religion of salvation, appears to me somewhat forced.8 And this is the case from both sides. Neither Muslims nor Christians are willing to place Islam only on the side of law, nor Christianity only on the side of salvation. For one thing, in Islam the polyphony of voices on the concept of mercy would be too little valued, since in Islam mercy means, as one may explain, as in Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s (d. 505/1111) case,9 something more than guidance (including forgiveness and knowledge of God through His creation). As God in the Qur’an states, ‘My mercy embraces all things’ (Q 7:156). With respect to Christianity, the polyphony of voices on the notion of forgiveness would thus be forfeited, if one were to abbreviate Christian soteriology entirely on the idea of salvation. This polyphony in the Christian idea of reconciliation is impressively expressed in Calvin’s teaching: salvation, liberation, and guidance belong together (as in the priestly, kingly, and prophetic ministries of Christ).10 Thirdly, repentance as a condition for forgiveness and mercy. With regard to repentance, it is important to touch on Ghazālī’s work, for he wrote an entire book on repentance contained in his 40-volume work Revival of the Religious Sciences.11 For him, the maxim is central: ‘Whoever repents of sin is someone who is free of sin.’12 Repentance, however, does not work without ‘belief ’.13 In metaphorical language, Ghazālī goes on: ‘When a reasonable person owns a precious pearl and it goes missing […] he cannot help but cry about its loss. When it goes missing and its loss becomes a cause for his sin, then he has even more to cry  7  Gustav E. von Grünebaum, Studien zum Kulturbild und Selbstverständnis des Islam, Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1984, p. 174.  8 See Ralf K. Wüstenberg, Islam ist Hingabe. Eine Entdeckungsreise in das Innere einer Religion, Gütersloh: Gütersoher Verlag, 2016 (English trans. Islam as Devotion. A Journey into the Interior of a Religion, trans. Randi Lundell, Lanham MD: Fortress Academic/Lexington Books, 2019).  9  Wüstenberg, Islam, pp. 71–83. 10  John Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis Vol. 2 Ch. 15 (= Inst. II, 15), English trans. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeall, trans. F. L. Battles (= The Library of Christian Classics vol. 20/21), Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011, 1961; German trans. Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, trans. Otto Weber, Neukirchen: Neukirchner Verlag, 4th ed., 1986. For Calvin, Jesus of Nazareth was not only a priest, but also a prophet and a king. See Ralf K. Wüstenberg, Christology. How do we Talk about Jesus Christ Today, Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014, pp. 77–84. 11  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (‘The Revival of the Religious Sciences’), Book 31: On Repentance. Citation from this book according to my own translation from the German: Die Stufen der Gottesliebe, trans. R. Gramlich, Stuttgart: Freiburger Islamstudien 10, 1984, pp. 19–135: ‘Die Umkehr. Von den Büchern über “Die Belebung der religiösen Wissenschaften”’). 12  Hadith cited in al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance (Gramlich, p. 27, n. 13). 13  See al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 7 (Gramlich, p. 24).

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about. Now every hour of life is, indeed every breath is, a precious, irreplaceable and non-exchangeable pearl, for it serves to bring you to everlasting blessedness and to save you from eternal damnation.’14 Even the Prophet often prayed for forgiveness: ‘People, turn in repentance to God and seek refuge in God. I myself turn a hundred times a day in contrition to God.’15 Although repentance should happen immediately and without delay, there is no such thing as ‘too late.’ ‘God accepts the repentance of the sinner anytime, even up to his last breath.’16 In the form of a story, Ghazālī tells of a man who, because of the sins that he committed, asks whether there is any chance of repentance for him. When the person he was asking saw ‘the eyes of the man swimming in tears, he said to him: “Paradise has eight gates. Each of the gates can be opened by a man, but not the gate of repentance. That one is guarded by an angel.”’17 The Islamic view of God includes the sorrowful longing for human repentance: ‘God stretches out His hand to the repentant one for so long as the one who does evil in the night, until the day, and to the one who does evil in the day, to the night, until the sun rises in the west’.18 This means: up until the final judgment.19 It goes on to say that God ‘forgives guilt and accepts repentance’ (Q 40:3). On the one hand, any doubt is expelled that ‘every true repentance is accepted by God.’20 On the other hand, God’s sorrow is expressed, awakening the hope that God’s forgiveness of men will truly be realised. For Ghazālī, the basic idea is, ‘that forgiveness is necessarily a firm corollary to repentance.’21 In this context, it is understandable that in the Islamic tradition it is possible to talk about God’s turning toward man. Again, this is communicated by way of a story: ‘One person says: “I know that God forgives me”. The other man says: “When?” The first one says, “When He turned toward me.”’22 Repentance through reflection? If repentance for Ghazālī is connected with ‘guidance’, so we receive hints of connections to Lutheran theology (as will be explored later alongside the distinction between ‘Law and Gospel’).

14 Ibid.

15 According to a tradition reported by Muslim, cited in al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance (Gramlich, p. 37). 16  According to a hadith in an authentic tradition of Tirmidhī, cited in al-Ghazālī, ibid. 17 Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 75 (Gramlich, p. 47). 18  The hadith referred to is narrated by Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī; cited in al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 67 (Gramlich, p. 45). 19  Ideas about the ‘Last Judgment’ are numerous in Islam, Ghazālī dedicated the last of his 40-volume Iḥyāʾ to this theme, see for English trans. The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife/Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu. Book XL of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʻulūm al-dīn) by al-Ghazālī, trans. T. J. Winter, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1989; German trans. Die kostbare Perle im Wissen des Jenseits, trans. and ed. M. Brugsch, Zypern: Spohr 2009. 20  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 61 (Gramlich, p. 43). 21  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 77 (Gramlich, p. 47). 22 The hadith refers to ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām; cited in al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 77 (Gramlich, p. 47).

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Finally, banishment from paradise and God’s reaction to the Fall. Bertram Schmitz observes that in Islam humankind was also banished from the Garden;23 or to retain the metaphor, they had fallen out of paradise. The question to ask is whether God is less of a ‘stranger’ in Islam than He is in Christianity. For the Christian Reformer Calvin, the disobedience of Adam relates to his lack of faith; in short, ‘disobedience is the root of evil.’24 It was not the eating of the forbidden fruit that ‘was the problem, but lack of faith which led to disobedience.’25 When the person eats the forbidden fruit, he oversteps his God-given boundaries and subsequently undergoes separation from God; Calvin speaks of this in terms of a dividing wall (cloud) between God and man.26 We cannot therefore go back to a situation where there is no alienation, no lack of faith, or no disobedience. Put succinctly: humankind cannot return to paradise. Might not a Muslim find him or herself in the condition that Calvin discussed under the theme of original sin: alienation, disobedience, and thirst for power?27

Striking Differences and Similarities A constructivist approach to structural commonalities in the understanding of sin between Christianity and Islam will not eliminate these differences. There is evidence for structural parallels between a Qur’anic and a Biblical understanding of sin, but this does not necessarily imply consensus in terms of its theological contents. Simply put, in both Islam and in Christianity people have fallen, but they have fallen – literally speaking – differently. For Ghazālī, for example, after the Fall, people are still able to obey God, because God has set a path for them, which they have to follow (Q 45:18). According to Christian faith, people have fallen so far that they are not able to help themselves to satisfy the divine commandments by their own efforts (such as in the double-commandment to love, Dtn. 6:5; Lev. 19:18). Luther’s experience in the cloister was exactly this: that 23  See Schmitz, Der Koran, p. 66: ‘Der Satan verleitet ihn (Adam), so dass er – und damit wie Vers 38 nachträgt: “alle” (der Mensch an sich, die Menschheit) – das Paradies zu verlassen habe’. 24  Calvin, Inst. II, 1,4. 25  Georg Plasger, Johannes Calvins Theologie. Eine Einführung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009, p. 53 (English translation of this citation by Randi Lundell). 26  Tjarko Stadtland, Rechfertigung und Heiligung bei Calvin, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1972, p. 157. 27  John de Gruchy, John Calvin. Christian Humanist and Evangelical Reformer, Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009, p. 155 gives evidence of what ‘original sin’ means: ‘I believe that sin  – whether understood as the will-to-power that leads to violence, the destructive self-centeredness that prevents us from loving God or others, or defined of greed, corruption and everything else that dehumanizes us and our fellows – is a reality. We may not interpret the Fall of humanity in the same way as Augustin did, but it remains a symbol of what happens in the real world. Corruption finds a way in every utopian paradise; liberation movements become dictatorships, freedom turns into license, and moral commitments become legalistic and oppressive.’

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despite all of his efforts, he could not comply with the obedience he owed to God. For Calvin, likewise, the Fall from grace is so severe that the person can only obey God after his ‘rebirth’ in baptism as a Christian. ‘Rebirth’ means two things for Calvin: forgiveness of sins and imputation of the righteousness of Christ. ‘Forgiveness of sins means: turning away from the usual way of thinking that God loves only the worthy and punishes the unworthy. In the forgiveness of sins, God reveals the goodness of His majesty beyond human measures of understanding.’28 Forgiveness of sins is clearly a theme in Islam. Representation in the sense of imputation, or transfer of righteousness, from another being, such as Muhammad, to us (pro nobis) is something alien to Islam. For the Christian faith, the attribution of the righteousness of Christ relates to the assumption that in Jesus of Nazareth something special, indeed, whatever is actually authentic about being human is expressed so that the person is capable of love, of keeping the commandments, and of complete obedience.29 Jesus fulfils the double commandment of love (Dtn. 6:50; Lev. 19:18), which is all that love is capable of: love that ‘does not seek itself,’ does not ‘become bitter,’ and ‘does not count evil,’ (1 Cor. 13). He adheres to the boundaries given by God (‘Your Will be done, not mine’) and does not question God’s commands (‘did God say?’). He is obedient and gives himself completely to God, proving himself righteous before Him. In this way, Jesus is more than just a model for us. We not only strive for His righteousness but become part of it due to the righteousness that He has won and that is now, through God’s grace and promise, attributed to us (lat. imputatio). In sum, Protestant theology lacks a prevailing idea of any representative fulfilment of the law. For the Christian, divine mercy in the sense of guidance and forgiveness is imputed from outside one as a foreign righteousness (iustitia aliena); namely, the justification of Jesus’ righteousness for me (pro me). From this attribution, or imputation, those who are ‘born again’ grow in obedience to God and are eventually healed in relationship to Christ. According to Calvin, this ‘sanctification’ is accomplished through a process: little by little (magis ac magis), the believer grows in soteriological dependency on God. This idea of growth in faith30 allows for another comparison with Islam because, for Calvin, now the person is able to obey willingly. In our dialogue with Islam, it is important to recall what we have heard from Ghazālī: repentance has to do with ‘re-flection’. Here we receive indications of connecting lines to Lutheran theology, particularly related to the distinction

28 Stadtland,

Rechtfertigung, p. 152.  See for the following, Wüstenberg, Christology, pp. 66–8. 30  Ralf K. Wüstenberg, “Wachstum im Glauben? Eine Analyse der Rede vom ‘Fortschreiten’ in Calvins ‘Institutio’”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie (NZSTh), 46 (2004), pp. 264–7. 29

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between ‘Law and Gospel’.31 ‘Reflection’, according to the Islamic thinker, ‘inflicts a sharp pain on the heart’.32 This pain arises from personal failure and is evaded, because no one wants to put themselves in this position: ‘Therefore the heart flees from it and finds its pleasure rather in the comfortable peace of the things of this world.’ On the other hand, whoever allows the pain to continue is (in Lutheran terms: convicted by the ‘Law’) open to the affection of God (the ‘Gospel’ as Good News through the redeeming love of God). It would appear that there are similarities to this understanding in Islam, since here also God takes the initiative and turns toward the sinner. Regret is about (similar to the Reformation idea of God’s figurative work) ‘God’s creating activity’ and is defined as the ‘pain of the heart when it senses that its loved one has gone.’33 Regret then literally means to turn away from a path that ‘leads away from God.’34 This turning implies for the first time the knowledge and understanding of that fact that the person had previously been on the wrong path. The recognition of sin also develops from the interrelationship between knowledge of self and knowledge of God. Ghazālī, like Calvin, reflected on this interrelation, advising us to look at ourselves in our ‘true being:’ ‘what you are, where you have come from, where you are going, how you were created, what makes you happy and how you become happy, what makes you sad and how you become sad.’35 Knowledge of self and knowledge of God comprise for the Islamic theologian, as for Calvin, a similarly continuous process. Calvin even goes so far as to say that it is best if one has learned to dislike oneself.36 However, whoever

31  The assumption is that healing can only take place when there is recognition of the need for it. The individual is confronted, indeed ‘reflected’ back to himself and, forced to see his own horrible reflection. The law then becomes the tool that drives the person to the Gospel and to an entirely new way of seeing, and to a basically new existential experience. In the prevailing distinction in reformation theology between ‘Law’ and ‘Gospel’, the distinction is made between two points of view, or two basic existential experiences. ‘Law’ means the introduction of a normative standard by which a person is measured: this is the way I should be and I would like to be, but sadly I am not. The ‘Gospel’ is the other measure: that of being adopted, loved, and accepted without conditions – and all of this, despite the fact that the lover understands what this person is really like. The distinction between Law and Gospel describes two points of view by which the person is measured: as accused, imperiously listing one’s sins by name; or as free, not accounting for one’s sins and the recipient of a gift. Thus, acknowledgement of one’s personal experience of fear is the first step in making healing possible. The distinction between Law and Gospel helps to provide a contrast to the previously unhealthy situation in life. This contrast, however, first introduces the idea that through the suffering of shame and regret the person also realises that ‘I live under the power of sin!’ 32  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 21 (Gramlich, p. 29). 33 Al-Ghazālī, ibid., Chapter 175 (Gramlich, p. 85). 34  Al-Ghazālī, ibid., Chapter 40 (Gramlich, p. 36). 35  Al-Ghazālī, “Von der Selbsterkenntnis”, Das Elixier der Glückseligkeit, trans. H. Rigger, Braunschweig: Spohr Verlag, 2004, pp. 35–73, at p. 35. 36  Calvin, Inst. III, 7–8.

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dislikes himself knows utterly that he stands before God empty-handed and is completely dependent on God’s mercy. We recall that in Islam sin begins with forgetting God and His Commands. We again run into the notion that God should be remembered as the Creator and Protector of humanity and of all creation. And even where remembrance is not explicitly mentioned, the relationship points to the meaning of remembrance of God’s mercy and His good deeds (especially in the Medinan Sura alBaqara). Whoever remembers God, knows that God is God and man is man. To sin means to deny this knowledge. God is then no longer Lord of Life, but men have elevated themselves; the simple, ineluctable obedience toward the Creator of life is absent. The attitude is, as we mentioned above, not one of devotion to God, but of self-elevation. The result is disobedience to the command of God and the resulting isolation of man from God; he thinks he is God and thus becomes alienated from himself. He has distanced himself not only from God and from himself, but also from all of creation. As a result, life becomes devoid of meaning, and empty. Finally, God works against this alienation and shows mercy in suffering, so that the person does not remain in sin. Significant in an interreligious sense, it is also the case that in Islam, God takes the initiative, since He ‘accepted his [Adam’s] repentance: He is the Ever-Relenting, the Most Merciful […] When guidance comes from Me, there will be no fear for those who follow my guidance’ (Q 2:37–38). The turning of God is the condition that makes it possible for people to find their way back to God. Thus, the mercy of God is also in Islam, as we have seen, constitutive for the overcoming of sin. First, God turns to the fallen person before they receive ‘guidance’ on the way to Him. I think it is important to underscore this turning of God toward fallen humanity, because here a commonality shines through which has been previously underrepresented in interreligious dialogue with Islam.

Conclusion A constructivist approach to the commonalities in the understanding of sin between Christianity and Islam will not eliminate the apparent differences. For Ghazālī, people were able to obey God and to follow the way that God has set for them to follow (Q 45:18). For Calvin, the Fall is so severe that the person can only obey God after his ‘rebirth’ in baptism as a Christian. Reformers of Christianity and Islam, however agree, that unbelief is the root of all sin. Sin is ‘anything that bars the gate to knowing God’ and additionally – as a consequence – ‘the gate of life for men’.37 Even doubt about God’s mercy is considered a sin. Clearly, the missing trust in God is underscored here to the extent that it leads to a lack of  Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 101 (Gramlich, p. 57).

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faith. Ghazālī then includes all sins together under this one concept: ‘There is no greater sin than lack of faith.’38 It is ‘the curtain that separates man from God’. What brings man ‘closer to God’ is faith – here less in the sense of the gift of grace but understood as obedience in action. According to an Islamic interpretation, for the believer there is neither certainty of God’s judgment nor doubt about His mercy, ‘it is unthinkable that a person who knows God can either feel completely certain or can despair’. Rather, the person is entirely ‘diverted away from himself.’39 Ghazālī compares faith to the relationship between two lovers, for one ‘is entirely loyal and her concern is entirely focused on the face of her beloved and in thinking about him.’40 The maxim from Luther’s Large Catechism, ‘Whatever your heart hankers after and longs for, that is basically your God’41 is similar to Ghazālī: ‘Whoever follows their desires, makes their desire into God.’42 Accordingly, the person who prays to something other than God and makes it into his/her God exists on the level of the ‘punished.’ ‘That is the level where, though adorned with the roots of faith, [they lack] the true fulfilment of their claim’.43

Bibliography Ghazālī, al-, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Book 31: On Repentance. Citation from this book according to my own translation from the German: Die Stufen der Gottesliebe, trans. R. Gramlich, Stuttgart: Freiburger Islamstudien 10, 1984. Ghazālī, al-, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Book 40: The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife / Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, trans. T. J. Winter, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1989. Ghazālī, al-, “Von der Selbsterkenntnis”, Das Elixier der Glückseligkeit, trans. H. Rigger, Braunschweig: Spohr Verlag, 2004. Brodersen, Angelika, “Remembrance”, The Encylopaedia of the Qur’ān, Leiden: Brill, 1995, vol. 8, pp. 419–24. Calvin, John, Institutio Christianae Religionis, English trans. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeall, trans. F. L. Battles, Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011; German trans. Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, trans. Otto Weber, Neukirchen: Neukirchner Verlag, 4th ed., 1986. Grünebaum, Gustav E. von, Studien zum Kulturbild und Selbstverständnis des Islam, Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1984.  Al-Ghazālī, ibid., Chapter 102 (Gramlich, p. 57).  Al-Ghazālī, ibid., Chapter 166 (Gramlich, p. 80). 40  Ibid. 41  Luther, “The Large Catechism”, Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche. Vollständige Neuedition (BSELK), ed. Irene Dingel, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014, pp. 932, 2–3; English trans. The Book of Concord. The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert et al., Philadelphia PA: Fortress, 1959 (English translation from the new German edition). 42 Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, Book 31: Repentance, Chapter 138 (Gramlich, p. 69). 43  Al-Ghazālī, ibid., Chapter 139 (Gramlich, p. 69). 38 39

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Gruchy, John W. de, John Calvin. Christian Humanist and Evangelical Reformer, Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009. Luther, Martin, “The Large Catechism”, Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche. Vollständige Neuedition (BSELK), ed. Irene Dingel, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014, pp. 932, 2–3; English trans. The Book of Concord. The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert et al., Philadelphia PA: Fortress, 1959 (my own English translation from the new German edition). Plasger, Georg, Johannes Calvins Theologie. Eine Einführung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Schmitz, Bertram, Der Koran. Sura 2 “Die Kuh”. Ein religionshistorischer Kommentar, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009. Stadtland, Tjarko, Rechfertigung und Heiligung bei Calvin, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1972. Wüstenberg, Ralf K., “Wachstum im Glauben? Eine Analyse der Rede vom ‘Fortschreiten’ in Calvins ‘Institutio’”, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie (NZSTh), 46 (2004), pp. 264–7. Wüstenberg, Ralf K., Christology. How do we Talk about Jesus Christ Today, Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014. Wüstenberg, Ralf K., Islam ist Hingabe. Eine Entdeckungsreise in das Innere einer Religion, Gütersloh: Gütersoher Verlag, 2016 (English trans. Islam as Devotion. A Journey into the Interior of a Religion, trans. Randi Lundell, Lanham MD: Fortress Academic/Lexington Books, 2019).

Part VI: Limits to Being, Limits to Naming God

God, Man, Being ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Explanation of the Intellect’s Capacity to Know God in al-Wujūd al-Ḥaqq Simone Dario Nardella This essay intends to present the human intellect’s capacity to know God as absolute being, as explained by ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī in his work al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq wa-l-khiṭāb al-ṣidq, and to provide an excerpt from the text that could stimulate fresh reflections among Christian and Muslim theologians on the agency of non-human creatures in revelation. The essay will be divided into three sections: an introduction to Nābulusī’s al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq; an explanation of Nābulusī’s understanding of the doctrine of the oneness of existence and its relation to the human being; and a translated excerpt from al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq that shows a particular consequence of Nābulusī’s vision of God and creation, especially of the agency of non-human creatures.

Nābulusī’s al-Wujūd al-Ḥaqq ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1144/1731), a Damascene theologian, jurist and spiritual master of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, was a prolific author who contributed to many of the Islamic religious sciences and has been gaining increasing academic attention in the last decades. For example, studies have been published on his travelogues, his work on dream interpretation, some of his fatwas on controversial issues such as music, looking at male youth, questions in Christian theology, the afterlife fate of the People of the Book and metaphysical doctrines, as well as other aspects of his thought.1 He was a staunch and insightful defender of Ibn ʿArabī, the renowned Andalusian spiritual master of the thirteenth century, and his commentaries and interpretation of his teachings were influential in later Ottoman times and still attract attention to 1  See Lejla Demiri and Samuela Pagani (eds.), Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and His Network of Scholarship (Studies and Texts), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.

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this day. This essay focuses on one of Nābulusī’s late works, al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq wa-l-khiṭāb al-ṣidq (‘The Real Existence and the Truthful Address’), and his interpretation of the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) therein. This work has been previously studied, critically edited and published by Bakri Aladdin,2 who observed that it fits into a long-standing discussion over the oneness of being and contested orthodoxy3 in Muslim thought, particularly in the Ottoman milieu.

God, Being, Intellect: Oneness and Multiplicity between God and Man The doctrine of the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) seems to have troubled Muslim theologians – regardless of whether they studied God through Muslim scholastic methods (kalām), Hellenistic philosophy (falsafa), spiritual discovery (taṣawwuf) or textualism (athariyya)4  – at least since the times of Ibn ʿArabī if not, possibly, from those of Ḥallāj, the sufi executed – apparently with the agreement of other sufi masters – for blasphemy, having said in a moment of mystical rapture anā l-Ḥaqq, ‘I am the Real’, i. e. ‘I am God’.5 The doctrine itself would seem to state that being is only one, God’s absolute Being. As for the creatures, they would be said to possess no real being or to participate in some way in God’s Being. It is clear from the debates surrounding the doctrine that Muslim theologians struggled greatly to define the exact meaning of this concept (since terms like ‘being’ are essentially contested and so are issues of the relationship between God and the world, as well as the human capacity to know God) and found many problems with possible interpretations that led to incarnationism (ḥulūl, or the belief that God may somehow indwell in creatures), unificationism (ittiḥād, or the belief in some form of possible union between the essence of God and the essences of the creatures), or various degrees of antinomianism.6 By Nābulusī’s time, the debate had seen pretty much every tradition and method of Muslim theology involved. Even proponents of the same methods seemed to disagree on which side to stand. Nābulusī attempted, with more than 2 Bakri Aladdin, Abdalġanī an-Nābulusī (1143/1731). Oeuvre, Vie et Doctrine, PhD diss., University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 1985. 3  Orthodoxy is a somewhat inadequate category when applied to Muslim thought, but I mean hereby the tendency to distinguish between various views with the possibility of regarding some of them as lying outside the fold of acceptable disagreement within the circle of Sunni Islam. 4  My use of the term theologians in this sense is inspired by Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought. al-Ghazali’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 5. 5  Alberto Ventura, Sapienza Sufi. Dottrine e Simboli Dell’esoterismo Islamico, Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 2016; Alberto Ventura, L’Esoterismo Islamico, Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 2017. 6  Ventura, L’Esoterismo Islamico; Ventura, Sapienza Sufi.

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one work, to cast light on this doctrine and defend what he believed to be the correct interpretation both of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought and that of Islamic theology in general, with an argument centred around semantics and then supported through logical reasoning. He also relies on authoritative texts, the defence of saintly inspiration, aimed not only at other theologians but also at those who claimed to support the doctrine but understood it in ways that Nābulusī abhorred.7 The cornerstone of Nābulusī’s argument lies in his distinction between being, or existence (wujūd), and a being, or multiple beings, or existents (mawjūdāt), and the ascription of various types of confusion between them in the nature of language and the human intellect.8 To avoid confusion between the first and the second meanings proposed for being, I will render wujūd as Being and mawjūd (pl. mawjūdāt) as existent. A literal translation of the two terms (wujūd and mawjūd) would be, respectively, ‘finding’ and ‘found’. In theological and philosophical discourse, however, these terms are used in the field of ontology. There is obviously much to be said about the use of these terms (the Arabic as well as the English ones) in philosophy and theology, in the West as well as in the Muslim world, however in this essay I will limit myself to Nābulusī’s own use of the term to elucidate his articulation of the oneness of Being, without delving into the discussion of the terms themselves, to which he does otherwise give great space in his work. It is my belief that his outline of the oneness of Being can be grasped in a relatively short exposition, and that the rest of what he had to write was due to the need to address the terminological confusion and variety that reigned in the literature on this topic at his time.9 In explaining his position, Nābulusī writes in the first sections of alWujūd al-ḥaqq: Know that when you hear us say: ‘Being (wujūd) is God’,10 do not think that what we mean by that is that the existents (mawjūdāt) are God, regardless of whether these existents are sensible or intelligible. All we mean is that the Being by which all existents subsist (qāmat bih) is God. In fact, among His Names are ‘the Living, the Sustainer of existence’11 (al-

 Ventura, Sapienza Sufi; Aladdin, ‘Abdalġani An-Nabulusi (1143/1731).  Unless stated otherwise, the rest of the essay is to be understood as a synthesis of part of Nābulusī’s arguments explaining the oneness of being throughout al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq.  9  Exploring that would require a separate inquiry from the one intended here. 10  The ejaculatory prayers and aspirations accompanying the mention of God and His people in the text have been removed to facilitate reading. 11 Qayyūm is often understood as ‘existing without depending on anything else to exist, and being needed by everything else to exist’. Its root (qāf-wāw-mīm) conveys the notion of ‘standing’, so its derivatives are appropriate to render ‘existence’ and ‘existents’ and discussions around them (and are used in the Arabic ontological discourse), if existence is understood etymologically as ‘standing out’. There is an unfortunate interference with my rendering of mawjūd also as ‘existent’, despite it being from a different root (wāw-jīm-dāl), whose meaning relates to the notion of ‘finding’.  7  8

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Ḥayy al-Qayyūm) and He has made it known that the heavens and the earth exist through His command12 (qāʾima bi-amrih).13

And also: Know that the difference between Being (al-wujūd) and existent (al-mawjūd), for us, is a necessary (lāzim) and determined (mutaʿayyin) fact, because existents are many and diverse, while Being is one and is not multiple or diverse in itself. It is, for us, a single reality (ḥaqīqa wāḥida), and it is not divided or made up of parts, nor is it multiple, despite the multiplicity of existents.14

Therefore, Nābulusī distinguishes Being from created things, i. e. existents, and in this way he can speak of oneness as well as multiplicity. He elsewhere also explains that the use of Being as a name to refer to God is not dependent on one of the divine names revealed in the sacred texts, but is simply an expression used to facilitate understanding of what aspect of the relationship between God and creation is being discussed when addressing ontological issues. In his words: […] that expression [which helps to avoid misunderstanding] is the word ‘Being’, which is known by everyone to be that single thing of which it is correct to say that by it everything exists (kull shayʾ qāʾim bih), so that if something exists by it (qāma bih), it is correct to say of that thing that it is existent (mawjūd), regardless of whether it is called by the name ‘Being’, ‘the Real’, ‘God’ or any other name by which it may be called.15

The question then is this: how does the passage from oneness to multiplicity occur? Why is it that when we perceive multiplicity in our normal experience of the world, we do not spontaneously identify God with Being, but rather, are confused by such an identification? As for the first question, Nābulusī says that, on the one side, oneness remains always one, as God, or Absolute16 Real Being (al-wujūd al-ḥaqq al-muṭlaq). On the other side, God’s first creation, the Intellect (ʿaql),17 as well as our individual intellects in their perception of the world (not only of sensibles, but also of intelligibles), has in its nature and in its basic purpose the function of dividing, first distinguishing itself from God and perceiving itself as first existent, and then by perceiving everything else as distinct from the rest and, to various degrees, as independent from the rest and from God. This engenders an impossibility for the Intellect to perceive God as He really is, i. e. Absolute Real Being, because the Intellect’s very distinction of itself 12  Amr can also be rendered as ‘command’, but ‘affair’ helps convey the sense of involvement of God’s Being in the existence of the heavens and the earth. 13  ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq, ed. Bakri Aladdin, Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1995, p. 11. 14  Ibid., p. 19. 15 Ibid., p. 21. 16  Or ‘Non-delimited’. 17  Nābulusī is referring to a hadith common among the sufis that states: ‘The first thing created by God is the Intellect (al-ʿaql)’. See Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2011, vol. 1, p. 307, n. 2.

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from God entails contradicting God’s absoluteness, since the creature, if really distinct from God, would be a limit to God’s own Being (as He would not be the creature). The solution is to realise that the creature is through God, and is only a determination, willed by God Himself, of His own Being. This determination, brought about through the Intellect, which is also a similar determination, has no Being of its own. It stands out (ex-ists) in the discriminating perception of the Intellect, but the more one ponders the limits of the creature, the less one realises that it is through God’s Being, while the more one observes its being through God, the more one realises that the creature – or thing, or existent – has no being of its own. According to Nābulusī, through its discriminating activity the Intellect comes to perceive many degrees (marātib) of existents and to postulate different subtypes of being (such as contingent being), some of which have no external existence beyond their being mental concepts, and some of which have a relative external existence. Even sensory perception, and with it the whole sensible world, is but a particular determination of the Intellect. The degrees of existents are mere considerations (iʿtibārāt) and determinations (taqdīrāt) or individualisations and essentialisations (taʿayyunāt) of the Intellect. Their variety does relate to God in that it is an expression of His attributes and names, so each existent is a divine manifestation (tajallī) in so far as it is God showing Himself in a limited form to lead the human being to know Him according to the human limited and divided capacity. These degrees of existents are not unreal in the sense that they should be totally disregarded, as if the human being was intrinsically delusional. Rather, in Nābulusī’s view, their reality is relative, because it depends on their apparent and transient relations with each other and capacity to affect each other, while God’s reality is absolute. Each in its own realm and place, all existents deserve to be regarded as real to some extent, and the human being (who is also an existent and therefore real only in a relative sense) must behave and think accordingly. This is the basis of the necessity of norms, in general, and of divinely revealed norms in particular. Divinely revealed norms, in fact, are based on God’s perfect knowledge of the relations that tie human beings to the rest of creation, to each other, and even to mental concepts or language, while human norms are based on the relations that human beings can observe by themselves, lacking the perspective for what lies normally beyond their perception. Due to this, Nābulusī is unequivocal in his rejection of the antinomianism of some who carry the name of sufis: for as long as the human being is endowed with intellect and can discern between things, he must respect the revealed norms. It is only when the intellect is lifted and the human being has no awareness or control of himself that he is not taken to account for his behaviour, as it could happen in the state of annihilation (fanāʾ) experienced by sufi aspirants. The ability to recognise Being as one in all things, and to recognise Being as God, is, for Nābulusī, a faculty granted by

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God to the gnostics (ʿārif), who receive it, not by themselves, but only when God decides to lift from them the veil of the discriminating intellect to annihilate (fanāʾ) their sense of self (anāniyya) in the divine Self, coming to an experience of absolute oneness. This experience does not belong to the creature, because the creature’s individuality cannot exist (i. e. stand out, be found),18 if it is to perceive Being Itself by Itself, come to know God through God, because the human being cannot know Him only through his created faculties. This experience of oneness does not last forever (although oneness itself, being God, does, and although awareness of the oneness remains in the realised sufi), and the creature returns eventually to the limits of the intellect. The experience is remembered by the creature, who is aware of it being part of his past, but he can now relate to things as it befits their place in creation, while being aware of and witnessing that there is nothing but God in reality. This constitutes a degree of faith (īmān) that follows the experiential witness of ontological oneness, just like the verbal and intellectual witness of theological oneness (i. e. professing that there is no entity worthy of worship but the one God of the Abrahamic faiths) is followed by faith in and application of the teachings and instructions of revelation. Just as the believer first professes that only God is worthy of worship and then actualises this by turning his efforts to what God has deemed worthy of it (prayer, fasting, charity, service to God’s pious servants and love for them, and so forth), without this entailing belief in their independent capacity to benefit or harm the believer, so the believer who has come to the experiential witness of ontological oneness follows it, respecting the right of each thing by acknowledging both its being a divine manifestation (thus witnessing God in it) and its being a limited created form (by dealing with it according to what is necessitated by its relations to other created forms). This experience of ontological oneness, which Nābulusī calls ‘the realisation of Being’ (taḥqīq alwujūd), is therefore the aim of the sufi aspirant and goes beyond the more limited goal of ‘the realisation of monotheism’ (taḥqīq al-tawḥīd), sought by the rest of the believers.19

Consequences of the Oneness of Being: Divine Perfections in Creation There are several consequences to the doctrine of the oneness of being, some discussed by Nābulusī and some found in other sufi texts. In this section, I will present an excerpt from al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq20 where Nābulusī discusses an aspect  In the sense which has been mentioned for the roots qāf-wāw-mīm and wāw-jīm-dāl.  Nābulusī, al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq, p. 9. 20  Ibid., pp. 243–6. 18 19

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of the relation between God’s perfection, or divine attributes, and those of creation. Here Nābulusī ascribes – by relying on the Qur’an – awareness and agency to all existents and creatures, rather than to the human being alone. This is not entirely new, as there are strong grounds for it in the Qur’an, but it is worthy of mention if one considers that the Islamic intellectual tradition and civilisation, much like the Christian one, has shown a tendency (to which there have always been exceptions) to consider non-human creatures as wanting in terms of awareness, agency and choice. This perspective has been probably due partly to the influence of the Aristotelian essential definition of the human being as the ‘rational animal’, thus capable of choice and knowledge, while animals and plants had only lesser faculties.21 Moreover, we may add the way the human being’s position as vicegerent of God on earth was understood by the representatives of the Abrahamic traditions – and in the Islamic case specifically, the idea of God’s ‘honouring’ the children of Adam (Q 17:70). Nābulusī’s arguments here are worthy of consideration by Muslim and Christian theologians alike, especially in a time like ours when awareness of the rights and needs of animals, plants and the planet is on the rise through animalist and environmentalist movements worldwide. Nābulusī’s words do not deny what the sharīʿa states about the relationship between the human being and other creatures i. e. that there has to be general care and respect towards them, but that there is a permission – and sometimes an obligation or recommendation (such as the Eid of the Sacrifice and during the Pilgrimage to Mecca) from God – to make ‘use’ of other creatures (minerals, plants, animals) for human needs, including hunting, slaughtering, the consumption of licit (ḥalāl) animal meat, and so forth. Where some may see a contradiction between ascribing awareness, agency and even participation in the Final Judgment to non-human creatures and making use of them or killing them for consumption, there is evidence of a trend within the Islamic tradition, particularly within Sufism, that attributes rewards in the next life to animals – and maybe to other creatures – based on their involvement in the fulfilment of God’s commands (generally through the human being’s use of them).22 In such a perspective, animals do indeed worship God and benefit from this worship in this life and the next, even though the human being – understandably, as God’s honoured vicegerent on earth – has a central place in the fulfilment of that worship. The full translation of the excerpt follows, concluding this essay: 21 See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907, p. 61. 22  See, for an account reflecting this view: “Sidi Muhammad Ibn Arabi Damrawi, may ALLAH be pleased with him”: http://www.tidjaniya.com/en/sidi-ahmed-tidjani/companionsahmed-tidjani/sidi-muhammad-ibn-arabi-damrawi (accessed 2 October 2018); Ahmad Sukayrij, Kashf al-ḥijāb ʿamman talāqā maʿa al-shaykh al-Tijānī min al-aṣḥāb, Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Shaʿbiyya, 1422/2001, pp. 124–5.

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42nd Connection (waṣl): The Divine (ilāhiyya) Attributes (ṣifāt) and Names (asmāʾ) Return to23 Being24 Know that the divine attributes and lordly (rabbāniyya) names are very many, as we have mentioned. However, the foundations of the attributes are the ‘seven attributes’, the substantives (ṣifāt al-maʿānī).25 All of them return to the meaning of Being (maʿnā al-wujūd) on whose exposition and realisation we have based this book, according to the human capacity, in the emanation26 of the most holy gifts (al-mawāhib al-aqdasiyya). The Attribute of Life (ḥayāt) Returns to Being Itself (nafs al-wujūd) The explanation of the seven attributes consists in our saying: as for the uncreated (qadīma) and eternal (azaliyya)27 attribute of life, which transcends resemblance to originated things (ḥawādith), it returns to Being Itself, from the point of view of the validity of all other at23  By ‘return to’ (rājiʿa) and its derivatives, Nābulusī means, as understood from this waṣl’s argument, a kind of identity – in some respect or upon consideration of some aspects – between the divine eternal attributes of life, knowledge, will, power, hearing, sight and speech, and existence (wujūd) itself, so that every existent (mawjūd) thing must by necessity possess those attributes too in some way. Nābulusī will attempt to prove this through both reasoning and textual evidence from the Qurʾan and the Hadith corpus. Two things Nābulusī does not seem to mean by this term – which appears difficult to make clear in translation but is crucial to understand his argument: first, he does not mean that these attributes are the same as wujūd or the divine essence (dhāt) in every respect. Such an assertion would have particular consequences in Islamic theology due to existing debates on the relation between the divine essence and the divine attributes, which do not appear to be part of Nābulusī’s concern here (and with each attribute he specifies in what limited respect one can speak of identity between the attributes and existence itself ). Second, he does not mean that the attributes will return to wujūd, which is a misunderstanding that might ensue from my choice to translate rājiʿa and its derivatives with ‘return to’ . The return is a conceptual return, as if to say that ultimately, the attributes seem independent of wujūd as Nābulusī has defined it so far in al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq, but upon consideration they are necessarily aspects of it, so much so that not only God (al-wujūd al-ḥaqq al-muṭlaq in Nābulusī’s usage) is characterised by them, but also every single existent (mawjūd) must be characterised by them. 24  Nābulusī, al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq, pp. 243–6. 25  The seven attributes of meaning are typical of the Ashʿarī school of Islamic scholastic theology (kalām), and the Matūrīdī school also recognises them, adding to them an eighth attribute, that of the capacity to create (takwīn). They consist of seven attributes from among those established by revelation to which the other attributes return in meaning, so they are considered somehow foundational among the divine attributes. Divine mercy, for example, returns in meaning to God’s Knowledge (of the needs of creation), Will (to fulfil them) and Power (to do so). If this mercy is manifested in conjunction with the creature’s suffering or petition, it also goes back to God’s Sight and Hearing. In so far as communicating to the human being is a mercy for them by granting them consolation and the means to guidance and salvation, mercy also returns to Speech. 26 i. e. the human capacity to expose and realise the book’s contents is and must be aided by the emanation of divine gifts from God to the human being. 27 In other contexts, azaliyya could denote particular types of eternity, especially eternity a parte ante, and the same would apply for qadīma, which indicates not having a beginning. In this context, based on the use made by the author, there is less of a need to specify, since their opposites (eternity a parte post, or abad, and endlessness, or baqā’) do not feature in the discussion, so I will translate azaliyya as ‘eternal’ and qadīma as ‘uncreated’.

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tributes’ existence through Being. In fact, every existent can be described as possessing life, by considering that it can validly be described as existing by the intellect. This is why God said: ‘The seven heavens, the earth and what is in them glorify Him, and there is nothing that does not glorify with His praise, but you do not understand their glorification. Indeed He is ever Relenting, Forgiving’ [Q 17:44]. This glorification is not by the tongue of one’s state (lisān al-ḥāl), but rather by enunciation (bi-l-nuṭq), as He said: ‘[…] Who has made all things speak!’ [Q 41:21], and nothing is outside of the glorification except the non-existent (maʿdūm), because the ‘thing’ mentioned in the verse is but one name for what exists. The thing that glorifies by enunciation can only be alive by the life that courses through it without any coursing, and that is Being, by which things are characterised in the view of the intellect, because of the dominance of imagining (wahm) over it, as we said before. As for the thing as it really is [in contrast to the wahm of the intellect], nothing has life along with God, as He said: ‘Indeed you are dead and indeed they are dead’ [Q 39:30], ‘every soul is tasting [dhāʾiqa] of death’ [Q 3:185], ‘Dead, not alive, but they do not feel it’ [Q 16:21]. God said, limiting this description to Himself: ‘He is the Living’ [Q 40:65], and so the fact that both members of the sentence – i. e. the subject [huwa] and the predicate [al-ḥayy] – are grammatically determined conveys the meaning that Life is limited to God, without anything else from His creation. The Attributes of Knowledge (ʿilm), Will (irāda) and Power (qudra) Return to Being Itself As for the uncreated and eternal attribute of Knowledge, it also returns to Being Itself, by considering that it unveils everything, according to what is possible for each thing. As for the eternal attribute of Will, it, too, returns to Being Itself, by considering that everything is likewise specified according to each thing’s condition in the presence of uncreated knowledge.28 As for the uncreated and eternal attribute of Power, it, too, returns to Being Itself, by considering that everything emerges from It. Therefore, everything characterised by existence for the intellect – according to what has been said – has some influence, at least in some respects. This is only because of the appearance29 (ẓuhūr) of divine power through it, and this divine power is the Real Being (al-wujūd al-ḥaqq). Hearing (samʿ) and Sight (baṣar) are Being Itself As for the uncreated and eternal attributes of Hearing and Sight, each also returns to Being Itself, by considering every thing’s cognition according to its circumstances in each of the states that belong to it. Speech (kalām) Returns to Being Itself As for the uncreated and eternal attribute of Speech, it also returns to Being Itself, because all things manifest to each other through Being. Therefore each thing, through Being, lives, 28  In other words, divine Knowledge encompasses each thing according to all its possibilities, while knowing which ones will actually be realised in creation. Divine Will specifies each thing in accordance with what divine Knowledge has already known that will be realised. It is easier to understand this by considering that in Ashʿarī theology divine Speech and Knowledge encompass what is rationally necessary, possible and impossible, while divine Will and Power only apply to what is possible, and particularly to those possibilities that are going to be actualised in creation. Divine Hearing and Sight only apply to actualised possibilities. 29  In the sense of showing, not of deceiving.

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knows, wills, has power, hears, sees and speaks by its subsisting through the Real Being and the Real Being’s appearing (ẓuhūr) by self-manifesting through it (mutajalliyan bih), as we have said about the verse on the glorification of things, because the glorifier must know whom it glorifies, will to glorify, and speak out the glorification. God said to the heavens and the earth: ‘“Come, willingly or unwillingly.” They said: “We come willingly”’ [Q 41:11]. The receiver of the command to come willingly or unwillingly must be able to hear what it is being commanded to do and must be willing to do it. The one who says: ‘We come willingly’ must be able to speak and to know that to come willingly is better than to come unwillingly. Indeed, God said: ‘Our only command to a thing, when We will it, is to say to it: “Be”, and it is’.30 Whatever is being told ‘Be’ can hear, and the one who exists after the speaker has said ‘Be’ to it must know what is being said and that it has to obey. God said: ‘O mountains, repeat praises with him, and also you birds’ [Q 34:10]. The one instructed to repeat praises must be able to hear and must know what it is being instructed to do. He said about the earth: ‘on that day, it shall relate its news’ [Q 99:4]. Someone who relates news can speak and knows what it is relating or saying. God said: ‘Because Your Lord will have inspired it’ [Q 99:5]. Someone receiving inspiration knows what is being inspired in them. He said: ‘Your Lord inspired the bees to “take the mountains as home, and the trees, and that which they build. Then, eat from all fruits and follow the ways of your Lord with humbleness” ’ [Q 16:68–9]. Someone who is inspired with this must know what it is being inspired to do, be able to do what is commanded, and be knowledgeable of how to follow the ways of the Lord. He said: ‘There is no beast on the earth nor bird flying with its wings, except that they are communities like you’ [Q 6:38]. Communities like us [human beings] must have essences like ours and attributes like ours, even if they do not possess forms similar to ours, since what constitutes the human being is not their physical forms, but only their essence and attributes. Then God said, after that: ‘We have not neglected anything in the Book’ [Q 6:38], i. e. We have not made anything deficient in the ‘Book of Being’. So, everything that has entered Being is characterised by the attributes of perfection in the sight of the people of perfection, and one can continue to mention other verses to this effect. Bukhārī and Nasāʾī have reported, on the authority of Abū Juḥayfa, that Abū Saʿīd alKhudrī told him: ‘I see that you like the sheep and the desert, so when you are with your sheep or in the desert and you make the call to prayer, raise your voice, because every jinn, man or thing who hears the voice of the caller to prayer shall bear witness for him on the Day of Resurrection’. Abū Saʿīd said: ‘I heard it from the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace.’31 Ibn Mājah reports on the authority of Abū Juḥayfa that he said: ‘Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī said to me: When you are in the desert, raise your voice in making the call for prayer, because I have heard the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, saying: “Every jinn, man, tree and stone who hears it shall bear witness to it”.’32 Ibn Mājah also reported, on the authority of Abū Hurayra, that the latter said: ‘I heard from the mouth of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, his saying: “The caller

30  This exact wording is not found in the Qur’an, but very similar ones are. See Q 2:117; 19:35; 36:82; 40:68. 31  Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, “Adhān”, 609; Nasāʾī, Sunan, “Adhān”, 651. 32  Ibn Mājah, Sunan, “Al-adhān wa-l-sunna fīhā”, 723.

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for the prayer is forgiven to the extent of his voice, and every wet or dry thing seeks forgiveness for him”.’33 The witness knows what he is witnessing, about whom and to whom, sees all of this, speaks of it and listens to the speech of the one witnessed. Likewise, the seeker of forgiveness for someone else knows the states of others and speaks out the request of forgiveness for them. Tirmidhī and Ibn Mājah both report with their chains (of narrators) to Sahl ibn Saʿd al-Sāʿidī that he said: ‘The Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “When a Muslim responds [to the call for Pilgrimage], everyone on their right and left responds, be it a stone, a tree, or a hump of the ground, until the earth is cut from there to there”.’34 The responder to another’s response must be able to hear the response, must know it and must speak it out. There are many other examples of this in the Prophetic narrations for those who pay attention to it, recognise it, realise it and witness to its truth, except for the arrogant and the stubborn.

Bibliography Bakri, Aladdin, Abdalġanī an-Nābulusī (1143/1731). Oeuvre, Vie et Doctrine, PhD diss., University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 1985. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907. Bukhārī, Muḥammad al-, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 2017. Demiri, Lejla and Samuela Pagani (eds.), Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and His Network of Scholarship (Studies and Texts), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2011. Ibn Mājah, Muḥammad, Sunan Ibn Mājah, Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1998. Nābulusī, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-, al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq, ed. Aladdin Bakri, Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1995. Nasāʾī, Aḥmad al-, Sunan al-Nasāʾī, Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 2016. Sukayrij, Ahmad, Kashf al-ḥijāb ʿamman talāqā maʿa al-shaykh al-Tijānī min al-aṣḥāb, Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Shaʿbiyya, 1422/2001, pp. 124–5. Tidjani, Mohammed El Mansour El Mohieddine, “Sidi Muhammad Ibn Arabi Damrawi, may ALLAH be pleased with him”: http://www.tidjaniya.com/en/sidi-ahmed-tidjani/ companions-ahmed-tidjani/sidi-muhammad-ibn-arabi-damrawi (accessed 2 October 2018). Tirmidhī, Muḥammad al-, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 2016. Treiger, Alexander, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought. al-Ghazali’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation, London: Routledge, 2012. Ventura, Alberto, Sapienza Sufi. Dottrine e Simboli Dell’esoterismo Islamico, Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 2016. Ventura, Alberto, L’Esoterismo Islamico, Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 2017.  Nasāʾī, Sunan, “Adhān”, 652; Ibn Mājah, Sunan, “Al-adhān wa-l-sunna fīhā”, 724. Sunan, “Al-ḥajj ʿan Rasūl Allāh ṣallā Llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam”, 828; Ibn Mājah, Sunan, “Manāsik”, 3033. 33

34 Tirmidhī,

On Naming and Silencing Paul-A. Hardy In the annals of theological anthropology, the meditative use of God’s names has not fared well.1 Indeed, logic-based theories of nominal reference have tended to silence all attempts to thematise it, since from the logical point of view, pure nomination without predication is ruled out. On the other hand, God’s names in a theology logically conceived refer to God’s revealed attributes on the basis of their meaning. Approached in this way using God’s names meditatively can only amount to reflection on meaning. Reflection of this kind leads to moral edification no doubt. One may yet ask: Does moral edification necessarily lead to spiritual transformation? Thematization of nomina divina – presented here – divides into three parts. The first presents the post-revelatory ascendancy of logic as an illocutionary act of silencing the uptake exposed in the Bible and Qur’an. That silencing creates a communicative environment, which robs pure nomination of its own illocutionary potential, by which I mean its potential to produce an ambience of transformative silence. The second part describes the possible displacement of referentialism, as a meta-effect of employing God’s names as indexical signs like ‘I’, ‘this/that’, ‘here/there’, etc. That displacement silences the utterer of God’s names, inasmuch as indexicals, being semantically empty, do not refer to, but simply display, reality. The third part opens a door to a new assessment of naming inspired in part by Wittgenstein’s ‘anthropological turn’ in his Philosophical Investigations.2 It suggests a different approach to theological anthropology, which is not without parallel in the later Heidegger. Repetitive invocation of ‘God’ is a technique to 1  By the latter I have in mind repeating the name of Jesus in Christianity. In the Greek tradition: Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Ὑιέ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐλέησόν με (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me). See Kallistos Ware, “Praying with the Body. The Hesychast Method and NonChristian Parallels”, Sobornost, 14 (1992), pp. 6–35. In Islam it is the repeating of the ninety-nine names of God, known as dhikr (remembrance). 2  On the tie between phenomenology and analytic philosophy centering in Frege’s influence on Husserl, see Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Introduction to Phenomenology for Analytic Philosophy”, Contemporary Philosophy in Scandanavia, ed. R. Olson and A. Paul, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972, pp. 417–29.

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silence the semantically-motivated voice. In that silencing there rests a hope of attaining a spiritually transformative power outstripping mere moral edification.

Logic’s Ascendancy as Illocutionary Silencing At the core of Frege’s logical theory of nominal reference is his context principle, echoed in Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus: ‘Only the proposition has sense (Sinn); only in the context of proposition has a name meaning’.3 To analytic Thomists, the Fregean account of nominal reference was not new. Victor Preller avers that in Aquinas: ‘Significant reference includes at least implicit predication’, given to complement the name and deliver its meaning.4 However, Frege’s contribution to the philosophy of language extended beyond its logical significance. In his estimation, the ingredients of linguistic meaning are not just ‘Sinn’ (sense) and ‘Bedeutung’ (reference) but include ‘Kraft’ (force) as well as ‘Färbung’ (tone) and ‘Duft’ (shading).5 In short, it includes those ingredients coterminous with the human voice. From the latter, J. L. Austin, his translator, constructed his theory of illocutionary, as opposed to locutionary and perlocutionary, speech-acts.6 ‘Illocutionary uptake’, after all, ‘is a necessary condition of understanding an utterance,’ as linguist John Lyons tells us.7 So illocutionary acts communicate how we intend what we say to be taken, be it a statement or assertion, a promise, a command, expression of feeling, etc. To eliminate the illocutionary uptake of communication is, therefore, to silence its force. This often happens naturally, since illocutionary force not being lexicalised is easily lost in transcription. We say, for example, ‘I’ll get it’, rather than ‘I promise that I’ll get it’, or ‘sit down’ instead of ‘I command you to sit down’ and ‘two plus two is four’ rather than ‘I assert that two plus two is four’. The voicing of an utterance, i. e. its illocutionary force, is almost inevitably lost in transcription.

3  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Kegan Paul, 1922, 3.3; cf. Gottlob Frege, ‘I have kept to three fundamental principles: always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective; never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition; never to lose sight of the distinction between concept and object.’ The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. X. 4  Cf. Peter Geach’s theory of nominal reference in Reference and Generality, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1962; and with G. E. M. Anscombe, Three Philosophers. Aristotle; Aquinas; Frege, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. 5  See Michael Dummett, Frege. Philosophy of Language, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; more recently Richard D. Kortum, Varieties of Tone, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 6  J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 117. 7 John Lyons, Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, vol. 2, p. 731.

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Writing lifts speech out of its context and turns it into a hermeneutic object. For this reason, a work like Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, in Latin De Interpretatione and in Arabic al-ʿIbāra becomes highly desirable. But as Martin Heidegger remarked: Here it is important to make a fundamental distinction in regard to speaking, namely to distinguish pure naming (onomazein) from the assertion (legein ti kata tinos). In simple nomination, I let what is present be what is. Without a doubt nomination includes the one who names but what is proper to nomination is precisely that the one who names intervenes only to step into the background before the being. The being then is pure phenomenon. With the assertion, on the contrary, the one asserting takes part in that he inserts himself into it and he inserts himself into it as the one who ranges over the being in order to speak about it. As soon as that occurs, the being can now only be understood as hypokeimenon and the name only as a residue of the apophansis. Today, when all language is from the outset understood from out of the assertion, it is very difficult for us to experience naming as pure nomination, outside of all kataphasis and in such a way that it lets the being presence as pure phenomenon.8

Pure nomination is thus silenced by assertion, the bearer of locutionary force. That Aristotle made it the sole domain of logic marks the beginning of our difficulty with respect to the meditative use of God’s names outside of a predicative context. At the same time, Aristotle recognised our capacity to transcribe different sounds to match different letters (grammata).9 But in addition to that there is also the illocutionary force associated with human voices, as Austin recognised when he wrote: The illocutionary act ‘takes effect’ in certain ways, as distinguished from producing consequences in the sense of bringing about states of affairs in the ‘normal’ way, i. e. changes in the natural course of events. Thus ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ has the effect of naming or christening the ship; then certain subsequent acts, such as referring to it as the Generalissimo Stalin will be out of order.10

Instead of Austin’s example, we may use the Septuagint Exodus 3:14, where the divine voice speaks to Moses: ‘I am that I am (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ Ὤν). You are to say to the sons of Israel: ‫ יהוה‬has sent me to you.’ The Septuagint translates the Hebrew letters as  Ὤν and into Latin as Qui est, i. e., ‘He who is’. Then 3:15 adds: ‘This is my name for all time; by this name I shall be invoked for generations to come’.  8 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, Bloomington IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006, p. 36.  9 Cf. Aristotle, De Interpretatione: ‘A name is a spoken sound significant by convention, without time, none of whose parts is significant in separation […] I say “by convention” because no name is a name naturally, but only when it has become a symbol. Even inarticulate (agrammatoi) noises (of beasts, for instance) do indeed reveal something, yet none of them is a name’ (16a19–28), trans. J. L. Ackrill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 43–4. 10  Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 116.

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Thus the narrator depicts God as voicing His self-denomination. However, the illocutionary force of God’s speech-act is simultaneously perlocutionary in that it has the effect of establishing his name for all time. So we read at John (18: 4–6): When Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. Jesus replied, ‘I am.’ (Ἐγώ εἰμι) Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, ‘I am’, (Ἐγώ εἰμι) they stepped back and fell to the ground. Again he asked them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ And they said, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. Jesus answered, ‘I told you that I am’.

Now if John is read in the light of Mishnah (Yoma 6:2–6), Jesus’ self-denomination recalls that when the high priest declared the divine name in the sanctuary on Yom Kippur, those within earshot ‘used to kneel and bow themselves and fall down on their faces’ (Yoma 6:2).11 Such was the illocutionary uptake of the divine name ‘I am’, when uttered within earshot of the Temple officials. Similarly, when Jesus declares: ‘I am’, the temple officials, come to arrest him, prostrate. Prostration was the perlocutionary effect of hearing the illocutionary act of nomination. There are, of course, other instances of Jesus’ naming himself in this manner in John, for example, ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:59). Each time Jesus does so, he performs a public speech-act carrying a specific illocutionary force, which has an effect on worldly events, e. g. the Christological councils of the fourth century and later. Turning now to the Qur’an, we notice that ‘Being’ is not revealed there as one of God’s ninety-nine divine names. It is nevertheless virtually present when, for example, verse 36:82 declares: ‘To will a thing, He (sc. God) has only to say to it “Be!” and it is’. This verse’s illocutionary uptake of ‘Be!’ is apparent in a hadith qudsī (divine saying): O sons of Adam! Obey me and I will obey you, choose me and I shall choose you, accept me and I shall accept you, love me and I shall love you, watch me (rāqibūnī) and I watch [over] you, and I shall make you say to a thing Be! (kun) and it will be (fa-yakūn).12

The illocutionary force of the series of commands effects a transformation in man’s ontological state in such a way that he simultaneously instantiates the divine command and obedience to it. That is, the one who obeys the command rāqibūnī observes and thus meditates on Allāh and thereby obeys the command kun issued at Qur’an 36:82. 11  See R. Kendall Soulen, “Jesus and the Divine Name”, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 65 (2014), pp. 47–58. The exegetical literature on Jesus’ self-denomination in John as ‘I am’ is abundant, e. g., C. H.  Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, London: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 417, n. 2; Raymond Brown, The Gospel according to John, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2008, vol. 2, pp. 754–6; Stanley J. Grenz, The Named God and the Question of Being. A Trinitarian Theo-Ontology, Louisville KY: John Knox Press, 2005. 12  Cited as a hadith qudsī in the entry on Aḥmad Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Rifāʿī, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb alShaʿrānī (d.1565), Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1305/1888, vol. 1, p. 141.

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Qur’an 93:6, however, reminds the Prophet that he too is subject to the same command when God asks him: ‘Did He not find you (alam yajidka) an orphan and give [you] refuge?’ Revealed in a series of illocutionary acts of interrogation, yajidka, then wajadaka, is the name al-Wājid (The Finder). And according to the grammatical theory of ishtiqāq, every finite form derives from its infinitival source or maṣdar.13 Al-Wājid’s’ noun infinitive (maṣdar) is wujūd, whose passive participle is mawjūd or ‘found’, that is, ‘encountered there’. The wujūd, or ‘existence’ is only implicit, since the basic meaning of wujūd is to find or encounter. Hence al-Wājid presupposes not only a finder or one who encounters. It also presupposes one who is encountered, one who is subject to the command kun! (be). Such a being is said to be capable of being found, an object encountered, who is in Arabic, mawjūd. Finally, Huwa (He) is revealed in the Qur’an (112:1) as a divine name also in the context of an illocutionary speech-act: the divine command Qul or ‘Say’! Huwa Allāhu Aḥad (He is God Unique). Huwa, however, is not a connector (rābiṭa) as in logical discourse. In nominal sentences the Arabic language requires no connector between a subject and a predicate. This is unlike English, where ‘is’ functions as a connector or copula. Grammatically speaking, huwa is the third person masculine pronoun, ‘he’. When it appears in a nominal sentence its function is to express emphasis (taʾkīd). At Q 112:1, Huwa functions as a nomen divinum in its own right and is used as a meditation device. Indeed, one often hears it sounded like a Urlaut, recalling the Indian mantra om. Here, it has no logical function whatsoever, but is being used not to connect sentential subjects and predicates. The nomen divinum is used to free the self from its own thoughts or what the Greek Desert Fathers called logismoi and sufis called khawāṭir. Illocutionary force thus silences locutionary force. But the illocutionary force of God’s voice in the Qur’an, revealing His name, ‘Being’ (wujūd), is in turn silenced by that of the imported voice of Greek logic and metaphysics. The latter suppresses the illocutionary uptake naturally associated with wujūd which is that of the afʿāl al-qulūb (verbs of the heart). According to Wright’s grammar, verbs of the heart signify ‘an act that takes place in the mind’, and are considered ‘verbs of certainty (yaqīn), doubt (shakk) or preponderance of probability (rujḥān), e. g. to see, think, believe, to know (ʿalima), to find (wajada)’, etc.14

13 See the description of ishtiqāq in grammatical theory summed up in Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Modern Arabic Literary Language. Lexical and Stylistic Developments, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press: 1970, pp. 1–47. 14  W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, vol. 2, pp. 48, 18–52, 5. Cf. Alfijah, Carmen Didaticum Grammaticum auctore Ibn Mālik et in Alfijam Commentarius quem conscripsit IbnʿAqīl, ed. F. Diererici, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman, 1851, p. 109–16.

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As markers of evidentiality, afʿāl al-qulūb index their users’ epistemic stance on an item of communicated information. The illocutionary force associated with evidentiality is therefore contextually dependent. Hence it lacks the universality associated with the copula ‘is’ in English. Wajada-users as well as users of other verbal forms derived from wujūd do not merely communicate what information those forms convey, but how each speaker intends that information to be taken. Needless to say, the force of evidentiality exceeds the simple assertoric force required by Aristotelian logic. The inference patterns in logic hinge largely upon the interpretation of syncategorematic expressions or logical constants.15 Such expressions are essentially context-free, unlike afʿāl al-qulūb. Exemplary is huwa, the connector of sentential subjects and predicates. The natural language of Arabic contains no sentential connector (rābiṭa), although Avicenna (d. 428/1037) avers that ‘the mind has awareness (shuʿūr) of its meaning (maʿnā)’ and innovatively constructs his logic as a first-personal engagement from within the activity of thinking.16 In contrast, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) made the purely formal stipulation that the derivative of wajada, namely, the passive participle mawjūd, should function as a connector in an artificial language constructed for logical analysis. His Kitāb al-Ḥurūf and other writings background that shift from the connotations of mawjūd as a marker of evidentiality indexing speakers’ epistemic awareness to its use as a logical connector eventually replacing huwa.17 In this way new modes of illocutionary force associated with speech-acts came about by silencing older ones. Thus, the logical regimentation of Arabic found in the Qur’an gave way to a silencing of its original illocutionary force. Exemplary are the divine names Huwa and al-Wājid. That development is arguably echoed in the world of Latin scholasticism influenced, as it was, by Avicenna and Averroes. However, Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) returned to the perspective held prior to the silencing of wujūd/mawjūd as markers of evidentiality by Arab logicians. This comes out in the story of his meeting with Averroes or Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198) in which the following dialogue ensued. Entering, the philosopher embraced him and said: ‘Yes’. Ibn ʿArabī said to him: ‘Yes’. Averroes, the philosopher following in the wake of Fārābī and Avicenna, lit up because Ibn ʿArabī understood his philosophy. But realising what motivated Averroes’ pleasure in that Ibn ʿArabī said to him, ‘No!’ Averroes was taken aback, his colour changed and he experienced misgivings about what he was thinking. Then the philosopher asked the greatest master of the science of Sufism: 15  Saloua Chatti, “Syncategoremata in Arabic Logic, al-Fārābī and Avicenna”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 35 (2014), pp. 1–31. 16  Ibn Sīnā, Kitāb al-Shifāʾ. Al-ʿIbāra, ed. M. al-Khuḍayrī, Cairo: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1970, p. 39, lines 6–7. 17  See Stephen Menn, “Al-Fārābī’s Kitāb al-Ḥurūf and his Analysis of the Senses of Being”, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 18 (2008), p. 62.

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How have you found the matter through unveiling and Divine emanation (al-kashf wal-fayḍ al-ilāhī)? Is it the same as what we [philosophers] acquire through theoretical speculation (al-naẓar)?

‘Yes and no’, Ibn ʿArabī replied and continued: ‘Between the “Yes” and the “No” the spirits shall take flight from their matter and heads go flying from their shoulders!’ To Ibn ʿArabī wujūd’s indexicalisation of epistemic awareness (shuʿūr) outstrips logical use and its laws of excluded middle, that is the logical law that every judgment must be either true or false. To Ibn ʿArabī, the acceptance of such a principle, as well as the law of identity – ‘p = p’ and ‘Not (p & not-p)’, undermines the significance of Q 42:11: ‘Nothing is like Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing’. The illocutionary force of Ibn ʿArabī’s remarkable response  – whose illocutionary uptake Averroes of course fully understood  – spelled an end to the dominance of the metaphysical voice whose illocutionary force the philosophers used to silence that of God’s names given in revelation.

The Displacement of Nominal Referentialism Despite the ascendancy of logic in Latin scholasticism, Meister Eckhart (d. 1328) managed a breakthrough. The first proposition of his unfinished Opus Propositionum (Work of Propositions), Esse est Deus thematises what scholastic logic called the ‘transcendentia’: Ens (Being), unum (one), aliquid (something), bonum (good), verum (true), which are synonymous, that is, convertible.18 Transcendental expressions are ‘topic-neutral’ in that their significance transcends categorial discourse associated with Substance, Quality, Relation, etc.19 Eckhart equates transcendentia with God’s names. Esse of course is the infinitive of the verb ‘to be’ and ens its active participle. So, God alone is properly Esse, Unum, etc. but also Aliquid, corresponding to Aristotle’s first substance, which he called ‘this something’ (tode ti). God is nominally ‘this being’, namely this stone, this lion, or this man. But this means that God’s names are indexicals. Indexicals, in order to signify, turn back upon themselves. Accordingly, Eckhart says: ‘God is a Word that utters itself ’

18 See Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought, Leiden: Brill, 2012, Chapter Eight. 19 ‘We may call English expressions “topic-neutral”,’ Ryle says, ‘if a foreigner who understood them, but only them, could get no clue at all from an English paragraph containing them what that paragraph was about. Such expressions can or must occur in any paragraph about any topic, abstract or concrete, biographical or legal, philosophical or scientific. They are not dedicated to this topic as distinct from that.’ The case is similar with transcendentia. Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 116.

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(Got ist ein Wort, dazsich seiher sprach).20 So when it comes to God it is always ‘this one’, ‘this true’, ‘this good’, etc. where indexicality is stressed by the demonstrative pronoun. Ens is thus associated with ‘this’ (hoc) or rather ens hoc aut hoc. Esse in the proper sense, which is after all the source of all things, flows, as it were, in virtue of its indexical significance throughout every universe of discourse. In this way, all creation as ens hoc aut hoc reflects Esse’s divine uniqueness, the One not followed by two. In his nominal strategy Eckhart follows Paul, who at Romans 1:2021 assimilates theiotēs or what Eckhart calls Gôtheit to the aorata and to the dunamis, that is ‘the invisible essence, which is to say his eternal power in his divinity’.22 Gôtheit is God’s Esse. Eckhart equates it with Aristotle’s and Plotinus’ notion of energeia, or gewürke in Middle High German. Shifting to Islam, the nomen divinum ‘Huwa’, the third person pronoun given at Qur’an (112:1) – Huwa Allāh Aḥad (He is Allāh, Aḥad), where Aḥad signifies One not followed by two, designated the divine essence or Dhāt (Self ), which in Arabic functions as a reflexive pronoun. Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) in his works al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ maʿānī l-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (‘The Highest Aim in Commenting on the Meaning of the Most Beautiful Names’) and Mishkāt al-anwār (‘The Niche of Lights’) distinguished between huwa as an ishāra (lit. pointing) and ʿibāra. The latter expresses something about something else, modelled on Aristotle’s legein ti kata tinos. Accordingly, his Peri Hermeneias (De Interpretatione) translates into Arabic as al-ʿIbāra, since it does not discuss the way names per se figure in logic, but how they function in sententially-expressed judgments, describing what is or is not the case, that is, what is either true or false. In this light we can understand Ghazālī’s isolation of huwa huwa and huwa ghayruhu as the basic structure peculiar to ʿibāra. The latter is always exemplified when one wants to say about something, ‘It is the case’ or ‘It is not the case’.23 However, in Mishkāt al-anwār he says ‘huwa in that case is an expression (ʿibāra) for an ishāra to whatever [a thing] is, but there is no indexical pointing to anything other than He (i. e. God)’, so that ‘whenever you signify a thing by ishāra (asharta), you in reality point to Him’. Only ‘you are unaware of [this fact] because of your ignorance of ultimate reality’.24 Given that huwa functions 20 Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, ed. im Auftrag der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936, 2:529.6–530.1. Cf. Frank Tobin, Meister Eckhart. Thought and Language, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, p. 169. 21  Cf. New Testament, Colossians 2:9. 22  The Latin translations sometimes write deitas and sometimes divinitas In Aquinas, deitas signifies the essentia dei opposed to the action of God (Commentary on the Epistles to the Romans, I, 6). Eckhart aims at this same distinction between actus and agere. 23  Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ maʿānī l-asmāʾal-ḥusnā, ed. Fadlou Shehadi, Beirut: Dar El-Machreq, 1971, pp. 21–4. 24  Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī Mishkāt al-anwār, trans. David Buchman, The Niche of Lights, Provo UT: Brigham Young University, 1998, p. 27.

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as an implicit copula like mawjūd its significance flows, so to speak, throughout any discourse about reality. Thus, every sentence in which it appears, which is virtually every speech-act executed with the illocutionary force of an assertion, becomes an instance of ishāra as well. In ishāra, Huwa becomes ‘opacified’, to use Michel de Certeau’s apt description.25 The pronoun thus resembles sentences framed by quotes, sentences that are mentioned rather than used. In them reference does not pass transparently through to facts or states of affairs. Sentences under quotes become hieroglyphs or icons. They turn back on themselves so that significans (signifier) and significatum (signified) become identical. Ishāra represents the capacity of any sign to turn back on itself. Any sign, in ishāra, may signify like an indexical, that is, like a demonstrative, personal pronoun or indicator of time and place. In this way, Ghazālī adumbrates Meister Eckhart’s ‘God is a Word that utters itself ’. Just as any divine name may model ishāra, it may model ens hoc aut hoc. Whether it is Eckhart’s nominal ‘Transcendentia’ or al-Ghazālī’s nominal ishārāt (pl.), we are dealing with indexical signs, which according to Eddy Zemach are designed for display rather than reference. The words ‘unsafe for lorries’ written on a bridge are part of a complete sentence, whose subject is displayed: it is the bridge itself. Here there is no need for a mental proxy to serve as a semantic backup for bridge. It shows up ‘in person’, so to speak. There is no need for a semantic backup, a Fregean Sinn to enable reference. The bridge utters itself, so to speak, to display not meanings lodged in the mind but actual reality itself or what to Meister Eckhart is Esse. Recall: ‘God is a Word that utters itself ’.26 Let us return to Aristotle’s recognition of our capacity to transcribe the sounds to match letters (grammata) as separating human speech from the noises emitted by brutes. Leaving aside the role Aristotle has played in the history of semantics, we concentrate on the term symbolon (pl. symbola), which he distinguishes from sēmeia (signs), to which category animal sounds belong. Underlying symbolon is the prefix syn plus the verb ballein (to cast). Historically and etymologically, a symbolon consists of two halves of a broken clay tablet which each partner to a contract kept and ‘brought together’, or more literally ‘thrown together’ to effect validation. We have here a metaphor for indexicalisation. The road sign ‘unsafe for lorries’ functions like a single half of a broken clay tablet, whose repletion by the other half is the bridge in the above example. The bridge’s coming into view to connect with the road sign constitutes an event of the language’s taking place. The event is the unification of the two fragments. Exemplary here is Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221) on the significance of the name Allāh: 25 See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 144–5. 26  Eddy Zemach, The Reality of Meaning & the Meaning of Reality, Hanover NH: Brown University Press, 1992, p. 79; id., “De Se and Descartes. A New Semantics for Indexicals”, Noûs, 19/2 (1985), pp. 181–204.

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The [letter] hāʾ in the divine name Allāh is the very sound we make with every breath. The other letters [in the Arabic spelling: letter alif and re-duplicated letter lām] represent the definite article to signify intensification [and thus serve to stress the Uniqueness of the divine]. The essential part of the divine name is therefore that hāʾ, which automatically accompanies our every breath. All life depends on the constant utterance of that noble name.27

Concentration on the only phonetically significant aspect of Allāh, i. e. the letter hāʾ, operates like an indexical, that is, like the road sign, except that it displays the breath (nafas). Running parallel to Najm al-Dīn Kubrā is Christian Hesychastic practice, which consists of sitting with the head bowed so as to gaze upon the area of the heart. With attention thus focused one recites in synchrony with his breathing the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’. In this way we can also understand the deep motivation behind Hesychasm. We must view Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Ὑιέ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐλέησόν με (Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me) as placed between quotes and thus opaque, an icon, if you will. In any case reference no longer passes transparently through to the divine addressee but becomes an ishāra, one might say. It becomes an indexical sign like Najm al-Dīn Kubrā’s hāʾ contained in Allāh. As such, the Jesus prayer creates what Gregory of Nyssa called a diastēma, a gap, where the breath is displayed generating a silent energy acting upon the spiritual centre of the heart. A diastēma (gap) is nothing other than creation itself (τὸ διάστημα οὐδὲν ἀλλὰ ἤ κτίσις ἐστίν).28 Similarly, Ibn ʿArabī asserts: ‘There is nothing in existence but barāzikh (gaps) given that a barzakh is the arrangement of one thing between two other things […] and existence (wujūd) has no edges (ṭaraf)’.29 Wujūd just is the gap between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ spoken of earlier, which Hesychasm and Kubrawī use of the name Allāh reveal. Yet, whether creating a diastēma or barzakh, nominal indexicalism illustrates the possibility of moving beyond sign-use characterised by other animals to that symbol-use peculiar to human beings. Diastēma and barzakh is the gap always present between the broken fragments of the ancient symbolon. Without that gap, unification (tawḥīd) does not take place. Once we have laid aside the strictures that nomina divina must refer to predicable attributes to fit the logical structure found in dogmatic theology, they can function no differently than a bottle label, a name, whose predicate is not something in our head, but the actual contents 27 Die Fawāʾiḥ al-ğamāl wa-fawātiḥ al-ğalāl des Nağm ad-Dīn al-Kubrā, ed. Fritz Meier with German intro, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1957, p. 65, § 137. 28 Gregory of Nyssa, Ecclesiasten 7, Patrologia Graeca 44.729c. Cf. Scot Douglass, Theology of the Gap. Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy, New York NY: Peter Lang, 2005. 29  Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Cairo: (s.n.), 1911, vol. 3, p. 156, line 27. Cf. Salman H. Bashier, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Barzakh, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2004.

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of the bottle or a price tag on a dress, which displays its predicate, namely the dress itself. The label and price tag is a fragment of a hypothetical symbolon; the other fragment, the bottled content and dress, etc., is what is displayed. The unification of two fragments is the event or what transcendentally speaking, Meister Eckhart called Esse or the Actus Essendi. Ens hoc aut hoc function as indexical enactments of Esse, enactments, that is, of actual events. The latter occur but fail of linguistic articulation. Even if they are via indexicals indicated, the event itself remains silent.

The Anthropological Turn A story about how Wittgenstein came to abandon the ideas associated with Tractatus 3, cited earlier, helps to understand what is at stake with divine names vis-à-vis theological anthropology. To his proposal of logical form as the basis of how language hooks on to reality, the economist Piero Sraffa responded with a common Neapolitan hand gesture. He brushed the underside of his chin with the fingertips of one hand, and asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ That single gesture shattered the Tractarian picture of nominal reference, as it opens the door to the model of divine naming we have been considering here. Wittgenstein, seemingly, came to understand that gestures are immanently intelligible, without any need of transcendent formal meaning. Gestures like Sraffa’s come about through the use of the hand to display states of affairs. They thus inspired what Gunter Gebauer calls ‘the anthropological turn’ pursued in Philosophical Investigations.30 Heidegger seems to have reached a similar view. He claims that animals, being purely corporeal and receptive only to sensuous stimuli, are incapable of gesture altogether. ‘The hand, though merely part of our bodily organism, has an essence which can never be determined, or explained, by its being [just] an organ which can grasp.’ Accordingly, the hand, ‘is infinitely different from all grasping organs – paws, claws, or fangs.’31 Having a world therefore is precisely what differentiates human gesture from clawing and pawing: ‘only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft’, can have a world. He concludes: ‘Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking; every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking’.32 30 Gunter Gebauer, Wittgenstein’s Anthropological Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2017. 31  Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred Wieck and Glenn Gray, New York NY: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 16. 32  Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, p. 23.

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Furthermore, the animal’s lack of gestural capacity as well as its incapacity to inscribe goes hand in hand with its inability to experience what Heidegger calls ‘the Open’, concomitant to ‘being in the world’. ‘The Open’ or ‘the clearing’ (Lichtung) is ‘a precondition for Dasein’. Heidegger apparently thinks that in the overlap between hand gesture and linguistic gesture, reality brings us close to what differentiates man from brutes. When he compares stepping into ‘the clearing’ (Lichtung) with traditional notions of the lumen naturale in man, he has in mind nothing other than ‘being-the-there’. Heidegger wrote in a letter: Da-sein is a key word in my thought […] For me Da-sein does not so much signify here I am, so much as, if I may express myself in what is perhaps impossible French, être-le-là.33

To say then that Dasein is ‘illuminated means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing, Lichtung […], by its very nature’. ‘Being-the-there’, more importantly for our discussion, is to be essentially being nothing at all when it comes to referential meaning. ‘Da’ (there), after all, being an indexical, is empty of mental content and does not signify reality on the basis of a Fregean Sinn in the head. When one says it is empty, one means that anyone or anything can become its user. That is why Dasein ‘belongs to nobody in particular’. It underlies every speech-act, every gesture. Dasein always brings its own ‘there’ along with it no matter where it is. It is in this way topically neutral like Meister Eckhart’s Transcendentia, which trigger the enactment of Esse (Being). Esse, as said, always remains essentially silent in that it is irreducible to language: sound or inscription. I take it that this is what Raimundo Panikkar had in mind when he observed: There is no-thing beyond or behind the word. The silence out of which the word comes and which it manifests is not another thing, another being, which then, because already in some way thinkable, expressible, would be in its turn the manifestation of a still more primordial being and sic in infinitum. The word is the very silence in word, made word.34

It is perhaps also what Ignatius of Antioch (d. 108) was thinking, when in his Letter to the Ephesians, he said: ‘Whoever truly possesses Jesus’ logos (word) is able also to hear its silence’ (ὁ λόγον Ἰησοῦ κεκτημένος ἀληθῶς δύναται καὶ ἡσυχίας αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν).35 Nominal gestures create diastēmata and barāzikh at every turn and must do so in order for the world to be displayed or for us to have a world. Animals are unable to create such intervals of silence. Certainly, they do not create them for meditative purposes. But any interval in itself may continue ad infinitum, 33  Martin Heidegger, Lettre à Monsieur Beaufret in Lettre sur l’Humanisme, édition bilingue, trans. R. Munier, Paris: Aubier, 1970, p. 182. 34  Raimundo Panikkar, “The Silence of the Word. Non-Dualistic Polarities”, Cross-Currents, 24 (1974), pp. 154–71. 35  Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Ephesians,” SS. Patrum Aposolicorum Opera, Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1954, p. 314.

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changing in quality, degree and significance. Zero degree, for example, would be digital silence, created electronically. It is a mode of silence. But it is devoid of any significant quality. From digital silence one may move to the silence created by illocutionary force attending the metaphysical voice, which as we have seen silences all non-assertoric forces rendered by language. For ‘with the assertion’, we recall from the citation of Heidegger earlier, ‘the one asserting takes part in that he inserts himself into it and he inserts himself into it as the one who ranges over the being in order to speak about it’. He continues: ‘today, when all language is from the outset understood from out of the assertion it is very difficult for us to experience naming as pure nomination.’36 But assertionism, to use the late Stanley Cavell’s convenient term, is a form of self-arrogation.37 It is a property of philosophy as well as theology and theological anthropology as well. At least, this obtains to the degree that theology studies man in his relation to God, the historical theme of theological anthropology. On the other hand, since in ‘simple nomination’ I let what is present be what is, we have the possibility of man remaining in place and ‘God’ dropping out of the picture altogether. Meister Eckhart understood this very well, when he prayed God to rid him of God. Prima facie, this seems contra the view presented by Schwöbel’s reading of Martin Luther’s Disputatio de homine, which defends the thesis that ‘Theology […] defines the whole and perfect human being’. It is consonant with the German Evangelical hermeneutic tradition, whose founder was Luther. One of the foremost Islamic scholars, Henry Corbin, theorised about divine naming in the Qur’an in the light of Luther’s solution to the conundrum implicit in the Psalm verse In justitia tua libera me, as Henry Corbin points out more than once.38 Nomina Divina count as instances, not of significatio activa as much as divine acts, whose action (fiʿl = energeia) takes place in us as their passive recipients. Corbin, the first translator of Heidegger into French, was inspired by Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift, Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des [pseudo-] Duns Scotus (The Categories and [pseudo-] Duns Scotus’ Theory of Reference). It was the theory of linguistic significance, the dialectic between significatio activa and significatio passiva, which Corbin saw behind Martin Luther’s solution of the exegetical crux he found in the psalm verse. In the later Sein und Zeit, however, we see in Heidegger’s discussion of ‘phenomenon’ a shift in focus. It is based on the etymological origin of the English word ‘phenomenon’ in the Greek verb phainesthai (φαίνεσθαι), the 36 Heidegger,

Four Seminars, p. 36  Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, Chapter One. 38  Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 116 and de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 300. 37

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middle voice of the verb ‘phaino’.39 It means ‘to show up’ or ‘to appear’.40 The Greek middle voice communicates the idea, not that ‘I am shaving’ or ‘someone shaved me’ but simply ‘shaving takes place’. The middle voice carries no implication of either agency or patience. Heidegger used the middle voice to explain the ontological event, Sein triggered by ‘being the Da’. Once the possibility of middle voiced-ness is recognised in Greek, its virtual presence emerges as a hermeneutic tool, even though a morphology dedicated to communicating its sense may be absent. But that possibility draws attention to the extreme likelihood that theological anthropologists misunderstand the apparent presence of a ‘self ’ behind our firstperson assertions and that ‘I’ for example refers to ‘self ’ in a Fregean manner.41 Such a misunderstanding made it almost impossible for Corbin to gauge the import of ishāra for interpreting nomina divina, something he fails to consider throughout his work. Instead, he appeals to Luther, read in the light of Heidegger’s dissertation. By doing so, he omits the thematization of the middle voice in Sein und Zeit, where any self, active or passive, drops out. Concomitant to dropping the self is the view that ‘God’, like ‘I’42 is a referring term. But if ‘God’ refers can it be any more than a personal construct in the quest for either Eckhart’s Gôtheit or Paul’s theiotēs or Islam’s aḥadiyya?” All this suggests a theological anthropology based on man’s encounter with silence, not an encounter between human beings and ‘God’, which varies from self to self. Corbin in Le Paradoxe du monothéisme rejects that possibility out of fear lest individual selves be absorbed into that silence and vanish altogether à la Advaita Vedanta.43 But apposite here is not the silence as it relates to mere repetitive practice. Just saying the same thing over and over again quietens us, it is true. Still, the silence rendered is owned by an action implying an agential self. For typically, whatever we do, we bring an ‘I’ to it, a me or a mine. There is, however, silence in the absolute sense. It attaches to no-one in particular any more than does the là in être-le-là. Absolute silence, in short, is precisely where the self is not. As such, it is essentially doer-less, even if concomitant to everything we do. Absolute silence 39  See Charles E. Scott, “The Middle Voice in Being and Time”, in The Collegium Phænomenologicum, ed. J. C. Sallis et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, pp. 159–73. 40  Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York NY: Harper and Row, 1962, sections 7, 74, 75, 78, 80. 41 Frege and Husserl believed that each of us has his own idea of himself, his own Ich-Vorstellung or individual concept, which enables self-reference. Cf. Roderick Chisholm, The First Person, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, p. 16. It was to counter such a belief that led Heidegger to thematise the indexical ‘Da’ in Sein und Zeit. 42  See the refutation of ‘I’ as referring term by G. E.M Anscombe, “The First Person”, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Collected Philosophical Papers Volume II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, pp. 21–36. 43  Henry Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme, Paris: L’Herne, 1992, pp. 192–3.

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occurs in middle voice and comes of its own accord when there is no longer anyone trying to attain it. Apposite is Heidegger’s insight ‘that the deepest meaning of being is letting (Lassen)’, which is non-agential and non-causal inasmuch as efficient causality still draws from logic. That is why Lassen appears thwarted by the fixity and agency of the divine names in Corbin’s reading. However, viewing God’s names as instances of ishāra, i. e. as indexicals, removes that danger. ‘Letting’ in that case involves no more than breathing, a choiceless action if there ever was one. Exemplary in this respect is again the road sign that lets the bridge show up silently in the Open, so to speak. The ego (al-nafs) then knows that there is no place for it in this silence, which belongs effectively to no one. There is nothing here for it to appropriate. Silence, absolutely conceived, is precisely where ‘I’ is not.

Bibliography Anscombe, M. E. G., Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Collected Philosophical Papers Volume II, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981. Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Aertsen, Jan, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought, Leiden: Brill, 2012. Austin, L. J., How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bashier, H. Salman, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Barzakh, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. Brown, Raymond, The Gospel according to John, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Cavell, Stanley, A Pitch of Philosophy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Certeau, Michel de, The Mystic Fable, Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1992. Chatti, Saloua, “Syncategoremata in Arabic Logic, al-Fārābī and Avicenna”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 35 (2014), pp. 1–31. Chisholm, Roderick, The First Person, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981 Corbin, Henry, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme, Paris: L’Herne,1992. Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997. Dodd, H. C., The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Douglass, Scot, Theology of the Gap. Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy, New York NY: Peter Lang, 2005. Dummett, Michael, Frege. Philosophy of Language, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Eckhart, Meister, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, ed. im Auftrag der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936.

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Føllesdal, Dagfinn, “Introduction to Phenomenology for Analytic Philosophy”, in Contemporary Philosophy in Scandanavia, ed. R. Olson and A. Paul, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972, pp. 417–29. Frege, Gottlob, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950. Geach, Peter, Reference and Generality, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1962. Geach, Peter, with G. E. M., Anscombe, Three Philosophers. Aristotle; Aquinas; Frege, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Gebauer, Gunter, Wittgenstein’s Anthropological Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2017. Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al-, al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ maʿānī l-asmāʾal-ḥusnā, ed. Fadlou Shehadi, Beirut: Dar El-Machreq, 1971. Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al-, Mishkāt al-anwār, trans. David Buchman, The Niche of Lights, Provo UT: Brigham Young University, 1998. Grenz, J., Stanley, The Named God and the Question of Being. A Trinitarian Theo-Ontology, Louisville KY: John Knox Press, 2005. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York NY: Harper and Row, 1962. Heidegger, Martin, Lettre à Monsieur Beaufret in Lettre sur l’Humanisme, édition bilingue, trans. R. Munier, Paris: Aubier, 1970. Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred Wieck and Glenn Gray, New York NY: Harper & Row, 1968. Heidegger, Martin, Four Seminars, Bloomington IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Ibn ʿAqīl, Alfijah, Carmen Didaticum Grammaticum auctore Ibn Mālik et in Alfijam Commentarius quem conscripsit IbnʿAqīl, ed. F. Diererici, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman, 1851. Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Cairo: (s.n.), 1911. Ibn Sīnā, Kitāb al-Shifāʾ. Al-ʿIbāra, ed. M. al-Khuḍayrī, Cairo: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1970. Ignatius of Antioch, SS. Patrum Aposolicorum Opera, Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1954. Kortum, Richard D., Varieties of Tone, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kubrā, Najm al-Dīn al-, Die Fawāʾiḥ al-ğamāl wa-fawātiḥ al-ğalāl des Nağm ad-Dīn alKubrā, ed. Fritz Meier, Wiesbaden, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1957. Lyons, John, Semantics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977. Menn, Stephen, “Al-Fārābī’s Kitāb al-Ḥurūf and his Analysis of the Senses of Being”, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 18 (2008), pp. 59–97. Panikkar, Raimundo, “The Silence of the Word. Non-Dualistic Polarities”, Cross-Currents, 24 (1974), pp. 154–71. Ryle, Gilbert, Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Scott, E. Charles, “The Middle Voice in Being and Time”, The Collegium Phænomenologicum, ed. J. C. Sallis et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, pp. 159–73. Shaʿrānī, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa alDīniyya, 1305/1888. Soulen, R. Kendall, “Jesus and the Divine Name”, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (65) 2014, pp. 47–58. Stetkevych, Jaroslav, The Modern Arabic Literary Language. Lexical and Stylistic Developments, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

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Tobin, Frank, Meister Eckhart. Thought and Language, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Ware, Kallistos, “Praying with the Body. The Hesychast Method and Non-Christian Parallels”, Sobornost, 14 (1992), pp. 6–35. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Kegan Paul, 1922. Wright, W, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Zemach, Eddy, “De Se and Descartes. A New Semantics for Indexicals”, Noûs, 19 (1985), pp. 181–204. Zemach, Eddy, The Reality of Meaning & the Meaning of Reality, Hanover NH: Brown University Press, 1992.

Thomas Aquinas’ Anthropology Stuck in the Middle with You Conor Cunningham This essay will offer a brief discussion of Aquinas’ view of the human soul; its relation to the body, and the question of their separation at death; whether the separated souls persist, and if they do, does such ‘life after death’ constitute the person still, or is it somehow less than being so? In asking such anthropological questions, at a meta-level, an endeavour is made to outflank certain possible temptations, which usually come in the guise of easy dualisms. The first, unsurprisingly, being that of soul and body, but by extension the distinction between material and immaterial, time and eternity, and so on. A term employed to that end, is that of zoology. If in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, doing so ex nihilo then all that exists falls under the conceptual reach of this term. A useful fruit of this is the exposure of a certain prejudice, progeny of said dualisms, these indicating that we are taking something wholly for granted (namely, that life after death is a good thing, that we understand what resurrection means, or that angels are superior in an univocal sense to humans). This would be a failure to take up and enact the paradox of theology which entails a radical epoché, one that confronts the Abrahamic faiths, for they entail speaking about that which cannot be spoken.

Introduction Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology can be thought of in terms of the ancient idea of mixis, mikton, or krāsis, wherein ingredients (say, form and matter) come together to generate something new, here, a person. This anthropology is tripartite: Soma, Psychē, and Pneuma.1 As he puts it: ‘Man is said to be [composed] from 1  A tripartite anthropology goes back to Plato; subsequently it is found in the Jewish-Hellenistic reading of Genesis 2:7, most evident in St Paul (1 Thess. 5:23). Most instructive is that Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus and St Paul writing at the same time, but from very different perspectives, all employ a tripartite division of the human.

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soul and body, as from two things some third thing is constituted which is neither of those [two]; for a man is neither soul nor body.’2 Aquinas says the soul has to be form of the body and spirit. Moreover, he brings out a twofold act-potency relationship, one hylomorphic: prime matter in relation to substantial form; and the other, the essence – composed of matter and form – serving as a potential principle to substantial act of existing – esse. The composite essence is actualised, and at the same time receiving and limiting, appropriately. Moreover, it is of the essence of the human soul to be a substantial form of the body and concomitantly a spirit.3 Hence it is on the horizon of the corporeal/incorporeal: ‘The human soul is a kind of horizon, and a boundary, as it were, between the corporeal world and the incorporeal world.’4 Likewise, the soul ‘exists on the horizon of eternity and time’.5 In this way, it is fitting for God to become human more so than, say, an angel. There is here something analogous to a marriage of soul and body, wherein they become one flesh, as it were. Aquinas certainly challenges what we take to be common sense, namely, the absolute distinction between material/ immaterial, for instance, and outflanks any simple dualism. Here is a telling example: ‘corporality, considered as a substantial perfection in man is no other than the rational soul.’ Or, ‘corporeity in man is the intellective soul.’6 Indeed, elsewhere Aquinas undermines both the atheist and the religious in terms of their imaginations, for both tend to think of the soul being in the body, the only difference is that the atheist insists it cannot be found, and therefore is non-existent. It is true that form is in matter, but it also contains matter. Thus, he says, ‘though corporeal things are said to be “in” something as in what contains, nevertheless spiritual things contain those in which they are: as the soul contains the body.’7 The crucial point being that rather than any ghost in the machine (Gilbert Ryle’s phrase), it is more true to speak of a machine in the ghost. Conversely, the soul is a part of the human.8 Crucially, there is no intermediary between soul and body, so maybe it is more a question of hendiadys rather than strict dualism.9 Modern imaginations are, however, sometimes prone to argue in a rather sophomoric manner. For example, we will read stories about those such as Phineas Gage, apocryphal or not, wherein the poor railway worker was struck by a line of track, which passed right through his head. Subsequently his personality changed, and so on. The point of concern is the inference, whether explicit or implicit, that such cases point to the nonexistence of the soul. This seems most myopic and culturally laden, labouring under the impression that today is 2 EE,

Ch. 2.  DV, q. 16, art. 1., ad 13. 4 In III Sent prol. 5 ScG II, c. 86, n. 12. 6 SCG IV, 81; Q. De spirt. Creat a3 ad 17m. 7  ST, 1.8. ad 2. 8  ST I, q.75. a.4. 9  Q. de anima, q. 9. 3

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obviously more advanced than the past. Aquinas tells us, ‘if certain corporeal organs have been harmed, the soul cannot directly understand either itself or anything else as when the brain is injured.’10 We can conclude that the above inference is purely cultural or one of mere fashion, rather than wholly thought through. The co-dependency of soul and body is what is to be expected of such a marriage beyond union. The body, for Aquinas, is plenitudo animae, in that ‘the natural body is a certain fullness of the soul. Indeed, if the members did not find their completion in the body, the soul could not fully exercise its operations.’11 This marriage, or mixis, challenges our understanding of not only the human here in via, but post-mortem also. First, it should be noted that for Aquinas the being of the rational soul, ‘which is that of the composite, remains in the soul even when the body is dissolved; when the body is restored in the resurrection, it is returned to the same being (esse) which persisted in the soul.’12 This being analogous to how we are restored each day, materially speaking (namely, molecular turnover); and more, rise from a most dark sleep every morning. Yet there is more to this, more because we are tempted often to interpret such matters from the need of the body, from its perspective, that is from a state of corruption, from which the soul comes to rescue it. This is true, no doubt, but the body comes to rescue the soul also, saving it from its unnatural state: ‘For it is natural to the soul to be united to the body, it is unnatural (contra naturam) to it to be without a body, and as long as it exists without a body it does not have the perfection of its nature’.13 The separated soul is amputated, handicapped, maimed, or in ontological trouble.14 Why? Because for Aquinas the soul is not me: ‘It is plain that a human being naturally desires his own salvation. But the soul, since it is a part of the human body is not the whole human being, and my soul is not I (anima mea non sum ego). Even if the soul were to achieve salvation in another life, it would not be I or any other human being.’15 The soul as a part cannot be predicated of the whole (nulla pars integralis praedicatur de suo toto). It is for this reason that any separated soul has only a general and confused knowledge.16 Just as Aquinas rejected ideogenic illumination in this life, even in 10 De

spiritualis creaturis, a.2; emphasis mine Sent., dist. 3. Q.2, a.3, ad 1: ‘Anima enim est natura ipsius corporis.’ 12  SCG, Book IV, 306, n. 11. 13 ST I, q.118, a.3. 14  Bernhard Blankenhorn calls it handicapped; The Mystery of Union with God. Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015, p. 224; and Bazán says the soul is in ‘ontological trouble’; “The Highest Encomium of Human Body”, Littera, sensus, sententia. Studi in onore del prof. C. J. Vansteenkiste, ed. A. Lobato, Milan: Studia Universitatis S. Thomae de Urbe 33, 1991, pp. 99–116, at p. 109 [I would like to thank Vivian Boland OP for very kindly sending me this article]. Spencer calls the separated soul ‘maimed’; Mark K. Spencer, “A Reexamination of the Hylomorphic Theory of Death”, The Review of Metaphysics, 63 (2010), pp. 843–70, at p. 853. 15  In 1 Cor, 15.2. 16  See ST I,89, a.3 c. 11 I

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paradise,17 so that remains true for the separated soul, and that is why according to him, God must provide images for the soul, and even then, because this is in a sense praeter natural, it remains confused. This signals the most intimate unity between soul and body. Above we noted that our imaginations, atheist or otherwise, tend to think of the soul being in the body, and according to some, it would seem, the soul is immortal, naturally, as it were, being something divine. That being the case we fail to think of it as creaturely. In addition, the presumption is that immortality is automatically a good thing, or rather what it entails. Those who argue for the soul’s immortality do so because, for them, it is understood as an independent spiritual substance. We have seen above that for Aquinas things are more complicated, indeed his hylomorphism presents a quandary in this debate. For him, following Aristotle but going beyond him, the soul exists by way of the act or esse of a composite, or for us a mixis, and is somehow the subject of this act of being (Ipsa est quae habet esse). The soul, in short, is subsistent, a subsistent form, more precisely. The danger here being that such subsistence transmogrifies into a substance per simpliciter. This would fracture hylomorphism and render Aquinas’ position a stark form of Platonism. In Questions on the Soul, Aquinas asks can the soul be both a form and an entity – a hoc aliquid. In this text and those that follow, he argues that, yes, the soul can indeed subsist per se, but crucially it is not complete in either a species nor the genus of substance.18 Consolidating this, Thomas insists that the soul is intrinsically, that is, naturally, the form of the body. That being the case, both body and soul act as co-principles of the composite. It should be recalled that being is for the sake of operation, therefore the soul is united to the body so that its faculties can work. ‘[T]he union of the soul and body does not take place for the sake of the body, namely, that the body may be ennobled, but for the sake of the soul, which needs the body for its own perfection’.19 So much for Phineas Gage. To repeat, the soul being the form of the body gives two perfections here, one substantial, namely, that its nature will be, that is, it will be the soul, and an accidental perfection, as it were, which is its operation, namely, achieving intellectual knowledge.20 The human soul does not naturally occur on its own; in this way it is like a normal body part, say, a severed hand, an unnatural state, no doubt. The difference being of not only the ability to inhere (as a type of relation) but to subsist; therefore we can understand its unique mode of being as one of mixed subsistence, as an incomplete substance, which is exhausted by the human soul.21 No other creature exemplifies this.  ST, I, q.94, a.2.  Q. de anima, a.1. 19  QDSC, p. 77. 20  See Q. de anima, a.1, ad 7m. 21  See Jeffrey E. Brower, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, Part V. 17 18

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Hendiadys: ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ Aquinas’ account of the soul is concerned to avoid eclectic Aristotelianism wherein the soul is both a complete Platonic spiritual substance and a complete Aristotelian form. In different texts his approach is often in reverse, being so because of the concern at hand. The two main approaches are either one beginning with descent (into matter) or one beginning with ascent (from matter); the latter begins with the soul as form, whilst the former treats the soul as an intellectual substance or creature. Most of the texts involve both ascent and descent, except perhaps in the Compendium of Theology which mostly concerns itself with descent as it is not really interested in Aristotelian form, given its remit. The two approaches can also be characterised as being either more theological (descent) or philosophical (ascent), though never as wholly distinct but more in terms of emphasis. There is a unity here, in terms of anthropology, despite philosophy beginning with form and then defining the soul as the highest form, which begins to transcend matter in its operations;22 whilst theology begins with the soul as the lowest of the intellectual substances that requires matter to operate. This mixed approach converges on the same truth. Analogously, just as the lowest intellectual substance must be in union with matter, so too must the soul after death. Christians call this need resurrection. Again, Aquinas employs both methods to avoid certain problems. By beginning with form, that is with ascent, Platonic dualism is avoided, for without ascent it would seem there is no reason for a soul to be embodied, except accidentally. Substance, or descent, avoids materialism, wherein there would be no soul, and therefore no human at all. The highest form concludes that the soul is complete in existence, it has an incorruptibility, but is incomplete as an essence, as it is only substance in a loose way. In other words, the soul does not need to be in alio to subsist, it has per se existence, although it does need to be in alio to be complete, for only the composite, the mixis, qualifies as substance. Accordingly, the soul needs the body, or matter, hence descent (or indeed resurrection). On the other hand, form as essence is complete, but not as existence, hence ascent: The body needs the soul. A most telling passage from Aquinas informs us that ‘the highest point of the lowest always touches the lowest point of the highest, as Dionysius makes clear in the seventh chapter of De Divinis Nominibus; and consequently the human soul, which is the lowest in the order of spiritual substances, can communicate its own actual being to the human body, which is the highest dignity, so that from the soul and the body, as from form and matter, a single being results.’23 This idea of touching is most reminiscent of Plato’s ἐφάπτηται, which recalls Heraclitus’ fragment, ‘The way up and down is one and the same (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ 22 See

ST 1, 76, 1.  QDSC, 2, italics mine.

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ὡυτή)’.24 Aristotle tells us ‘For up and down are not the same for all things.’25 One need only think of Jacob’s Ladder (‫ יעקב‬Sulam Yaakov) here, to aid our imaginations, for the angels ascend and descend, and the reverse. Zoologically this is certainly the case, whether, for example, when considering angels, the separated soul, or a plant. The unity of descent and ascent, of form and matter, body and soul, philosophy and theology, is brought out when we realise that hierarchy is suffused with both Proclus’ idea of converting love (eros epistreptikos) and providential love (eros pronoetikos), by which ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ serve each other. And the beautiful is to be found in the least. As St Gregory of Nyssa says, ‘there is produced, by virtue of a superior wisdom, a mixture (suanakrasis) of the comprehensible with perceptible creation, so that nothing in creation is rejected.’26 We should note that the unicity of both ‘up’ and ‘down’ is intimated insofar as the soul and prime matter are analogous to each other – in terms of potentiality, as Aquinas says they are.27 Prime matter, which is pure potency for Aquinas, and therefore lacks all form, desires form. Indeed, it is nothing other than an orderedness to form and act,28 the corollary being that matter is ecstatic. Similarly, soul (theology or descent), and body (philosophy or ascent) are born together. By way of an aside, we can maybe discern such a complementary approach in the Gospels wherein the angel Gabriel, on the one hand, announces the Incarnation to poor, Jewish shepherds, which we can think of as descent or condescension, in this more strictly theological sense. On the other hand, the wealthy Gentiles, namely, the ‘Wise men’, do not receive any such message. In the end, though, they must be told by a Jew where the King is born. It may be fruitful to think of the marriage of descent and ascent in this way. We have, in a sense, for Aquinas, form or act all the way down.29 Concomitantly, we have matter all the way up, at least in terms of potentiality or the real distinction between essence and existence: except for God.

Foraging for Act: Ontological Dependence The human soul has what Bazán calls a double ontological status: existentially independent (esse etiam suum est supra corpus eleuatum), witnessed in its intellectual operations, which transcend matter, yet dependent on the body (complementum sue speciei esse non potest absque corporis unione).30 The depend24 Heraclitus,

61 [F38]. anima, II, 415b28–416a5. 26  Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica 6.2; emphasis mine. 27 See, for example, DV, q.8.6.c. 28  In Phys. Lect. 15, n. 138. Also see SCG II, c.23. 29  See Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 131. 30  Q de anima, q. 8; see Bazán, “The Human Soul. Form and Substance? Thomas Aquinas’ 25 De

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ence of the soul is the very point of commonality between Plato and Aristotle that Aquinas discerns so well, and he is able to do so because his imagination is truly metaphysical and not physical, which seems to subdue any operational principles by subjugation to spatiality: Here as opposed to there; up contrasted to down, in an almost mechanical fashion. Theology must think in lateral terms, for we never know what will qualify as first or last, up or down, consecrated or mundane. Resonating with what follows, Joseph Ratzinger is correct to say that, ‘The anthropology desired should weld together Plato and Aristotle precisely at the points where their doctrines were mutually opposed’.31 What is most crucial here is the prioritising of actuality (ἐνέργεια) over potentiality (δύναμις), which is more important than that of form and matter; indeed it somewhat relativises those concepts. This way, it matters less if something is material or immaterial, except zoologically speaking, but rather whether it is in act or not, and in which way. This democratises Plato’s and Aristotle’s approaches. For we think of Aristotle in terms of sensibility actualising the soul in terms of all knowledge, including self-knowledge. That is, without sensible species the soul remains unknown to its very self. It must be actualised. From a wholly different Platonic perspective, or so we are told, the soul looks to higher spiritual intellects, and in so doing leaves the sensible behind. In short, Aristotle has the soul, which does not know itself, look down for sensible species, whilst Plato has the soul look up to higher self-knowing angelic intellects. In one sense this is true, though I am hesitant to admit that, for its truth is minimal as both Plato and Aristotle pursue the same quarry. Aquinas realises this and works out a fitting mediation of the two trajectories. If we truly prioritise act over potency, abandoning additive logic, wherein we spatially build and demarcate, and return to our zoology, we realise that the soul though looking to immaterial intellects does so to look for actualisation – this is the commonality between Plato and Aristotle, one that can be emphasised when recalling that such angelic intellects belong also to the menagerie of creation.32 To that end, both approaches are illuminationist just as they are both empiricist (higher intellects are creatures after all). Moreover, it should be recalled that though angelic creatures are higher than us zoologically, they are not so theologically, for it is we humans as rational animals who judge the angels (1 Cor. 6:3), doing so as it is we who bear the imago dei. The zoology of creatures varies greatly, but all creatures forage for act, except, of course, God, characterised by Aquinas as ipsum esse subsistens or actus purus. This foraging renders creatures analogically similar for they have the same, one Creator. Critique of Eclectic Aristotelianism”, Archives D’Histoire et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 64 (1997), pp. 95–126, at p. 123. 31  Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology. Death and Eternal Life, 2nd edition, trans. Michael Waldstein, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007, p. 148. 32  See In DC, prop.15.

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Soul as Forma (simplex) and Motor (multiplex) The soul is of course a form, as it is in this sense simple (simplex), and therefore static, as there is no potentiality for change, as such. Yet the soul is to be treated as dynamic when considered as principle of its own operations (operationis principium) in relation to it being a potential whole (totum potentiale).33 This distinction arises for Aquinas in this way: ‘Therefore, in the nature of corporeal things matter does not participate per se in esse, but through form: for form coming to matter makes it actually exist (ipsum esse actu) as soul to body. Thus, in composite things we can consider a twofold act and a twofold potency. First, matter is a potency with respect to form, and form is its act. Second, nature as constituted by matter and form is a potency with respect to its esse insofar as it receives it.’34 For Aquinas, essence includes both matter and form, hence the soul is not the essence, as its ratio does not include matter with which it is contrasted, and to which it gives esse, as act to potency. To reuse a quote: ‘Man is said to be [composed] from soul and body, as from two things some third thing is constituted which is neither of those [two]; for a man is neither soul nor body.’35 There are three principles here: esse, form and matter, and whilst these account for the unity of any composite being, in so doing preclude any notion of parts, it would seem. The question arises then as to how any being is to operate; and after all, for Aquinas, being is proportioned to operation. Kahm presents the conundrum well, ‘In a certain sense, operation is essential to the soul; in a certain sense, however, it is not.’36 Put differently, the soul cannot be essentially operation as it is simple, yet in terms of final causality operation must be essential, for a being is what it does, or is meant to do. Moreover, for Aquinas, a living being – here the human – is by definition a self-mover; after all for the stone to move we kick it, but not the animate, necessarily.37 Given Aquinas’ defence of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, of which there can be only one, then on pain of contradiction, and even though simple, the soul cannot move per se, or better, be the per se cause of its own motion. Aquinas gives the example of a how a hot thing cannot heat as a whole or all at once, as that would mean it is actually hot and potentially hot simultaneously.38 Aquinas offers three forms of per accidens motion, and it is the last of these that is of interest here, namely, that which moves according to a part. This way, the soul, which is simple, yet finite, must move according to its  Q de anima, q. 9.  QDSC, a.1. 35  EE, Ch. 2. 36 Nicholas Kahm, Aquinas on Emotion’s Participation in Reason, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019, p. 33. Kahm offers the only real, sustained engagement with this, to which we are indebted. 37 ST I, q.18. 38  In VIII Phys., I.7. 33 34

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parts. But how does the soul have such parts? A soul does insofar as the parts are thought of as powers, and it is in this way that the soul is not to be approached as forma but as motor, and in so being as multiplex. Now, it may be thought that such powers are merely ways of describing the soul in its manifold operations, but this cannot be the case, as that would be equivalent to arguing that an essence was its esse. As Aquinas points out, ‘As esse itself is the certain actuality of an essence, so operari is the actuality of an operative potency or power. Each of them is in act this way: essence according to esse, power according to operari. But since no creature is its own operari, its own esse, for that is only true of God, it follows that the operative power of no creature is its essence. Only in God is essence the same as operative power.’39 This fundamental distinction seems to fall without notice, and such neglect causes many unnecessary problems. The distinction between a soul and its powers can be noticed between the powers themselves; one power moves another, such as reason moving the irascible. This would not be possible ‘if all the powers were the very essence of the soul, since the same thing in the same respect does not move itself, as Aristotle proved. It follows therefore that the powers of the soul are not its very essence.’40 We would not mean to argue, surely, that reason and the irascible were the same as moving and moved? Following his teacher Albert the Great, Aquinas argues that the powers are predicamental accidents, as they are not a substance, nor the soul’s essence. Echoing God as bonum diffusivum sui, and as the soul’s esse flows into the body or matter, here the powers of the soul flow from the subject or its form, but do not signify the essence of that soul. Such powers are the soul’s parts in relation to total power (totalis virtutis eius),41 or totum potentiale (potential whole), and not parts in relation to its essence. Accordingly, the type of being they possess is in esse. The potential whole is to be contrasted with a universal whole which is present to each part according to its whole essence and power; Aquinas’ example being ‘man is animal’. A second whole is an integral whole. Here, the whole cannot be a predicate of any part either in terms of essence or power. For Aquinas, this would be equivalent to saying, ‘the wall is the house.’42 The potential whole is, for Aquinas, the middle way, and accordingly can be predicated of a part in terms of its whole essence but not its whole power, such as when we say a soul is its own powers. ‘The soul is a form insofar as it is act and likewise insofar as it is a mover, and thus it is according to the same thing that it is a form and that it is mover, but nevertheless its effect insofar as it is a form and insofar as it is a mover differs.’43 Crucially Aquinas says, ‘In consequence of the fact that the soul, then, is the form of the 39 QDSC,

a.11. a.11. 41  See Kahm, Aquinas on Emotion’s Participation in Reason, p. 44. 42 QDSC, a.11. 43  Q de anima, q. 9. ad. 2. 40 QDSC,

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body, there cannot be any medium between the soul and the body. But in consequence of that fact that it is a mover [motor], from this point of view nothing prevents many media there: for obviously the soul moves the other members of the body through the heart, and also moves the body through the spirit.’44 Or again (and here is the tripartite anthropology), ‘It must be said that the soul is said to be united to the body through the spirit, insofar as it is the mover, because that which is moved first by the soul in the body is the spirit.’45 The spirit moves the body, whilst the body moves the soul. ‘The soul grants substantial esse to each of them [parts] according to that mode that is fitting for the operation of these parts […] it is necessary that the order of instruments be according to operations […] But insofar as it grants esse to the body, it immediately grants substantial and specific esse to all the parts of the body. And this is why many say, namely, that the soul is united to the body as form without medium, but as a mover through a medium.’46 This begins to throw light on our anthropology: ‘Since it is the same form which grants esse to matter which is also the principle of action, and because each thing acts insofar as it actually is, the soul, as is true of any other form, must also be a principle of operation. It must be noted that, because operation comes from something that actually exists, in accord with the level of forms in the perfection of existing is their grade of power of operation. And insofar as some form enjoys greater perfection in granting esse to that degree does the form have a greater power in acting.’47 To repeat: as principle of substance the soul is without parts, but as principle of operations or actions it has parts. The higher the grade of act or form and therefore esse of material existence, the more complex the actions, as greater difference will be known, cognised and thereby united. Interestingly, on the one hand, for Aquinas, the higher can do that which is less, as in ‘he who can carry a thousand pounds can carry one hundred.’48 Hence, the human can do that which both animals and plants can, and this ability stems from the human’s characteristic ability, namely, the intellectual soul. So, there is something of an inter-species aristocracy. Yet on the other hand, there is an intraspecies aristocracy too, in terms of nobility of soul, but at the same time there is an intra-democracy in terms of the very individual, one that is more than useful as analogy for how different modes of scientia work, or the many sciences, just as it does for how Christian sacraments work (see below). Most importantly, the highest powers of the soul do not virtually contain that which lower powers can do (here Aquinas follows his teacher, Albert). The soul certainly contains virtually all powers, in terms of its essence, for the soul causes the many to flow from 44 QDSC,

q. 3. art. 3, ad. 9. 46  Q de anima, q. 9. 47 Q de anima, q. 9. 48  See QDV, q.10, a.1. 45 SPC,

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its unity. Crucially though, if we speak in terms of the powers themselves there is no reduction. That is to say, the higher power does not contain the lower. Put differently, the power of the potential whole (totum potienale) is not abrogating the validity of the lower. Reason cannot do what kidneys do, no matter how hard it thinks. The lower are not united in the higher (this is true for scientia also). The soul as principle of all powers possessed contains them virtually as their sole cause, but does not contain them formally. Aristotle’s image of the tetragon in a pentagon is apposite. Indeed, for Aquinas there is no continuum on which powers reside, likewise the sciences.49 The soul unites powers as it delegates to them independence, otherwise independence would not make any sense: a kidney on a bicycle. Yet, independence is for Aquinas real: ‘If there are two people, one of whom writes one part of a book and the other another part of, then “we wrote that book” is not literally correct, but a synecdoche inasmuch as the whole stands for the part.’50 The soul, in terms of being a mover, is master of one (intellect), and Jack of some. As alluded to above, this logic is transferable. Very briefly, the Cyriline51 understanding of the hypostatic union, adopted by Aquinas, renders Christ’s humanity a proper instrument of his divinity analogically comparable to the relation between body and soul. This is also apparent in the causal efficacy of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, as articulated by Aquinas after his ‘Greek turn’ (from the Summa Contra Gentiles II onwards), wherein at Orvieto he read both St John Damascene and St Cyril of Alexandria, along with the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon; a shift echoed perfectly by his concomitant development of his understanding of Christ’s two wills (again, as a result of ressourcement  – here Constantinople III), the human one entailing freedom (liberium arbitrium), and being an instrumentum divinitatis just as the sacraments are. It should be recalled that Aquinas was the only scholastic to employ Damascene’s phrase. In so doing, he was rejecting sine qua non causality, or covenantal causality, which arguably gave rise to an occasionalist interpretation that itself fell into nominalism eventually. Contrary to this, instrumental causality consists in the profound relation of downward participation, between Christ’s humanity and the sacraments as instrumental efficient causes of salvation. Again, this is analogous to the soul and its powers. In sum, Christ’s humanity, the sacraments, and the soul’s powers, all entail efficacy, indeed instrumental efficient causality. Yet this does not encroach on Christ’s divinity, or the grace which the sacraments bestow, nor the priority of the soul. Conversely, Christ’s divinity, God’s grace, or the soul do not subjugate or abrogate their instruments.

 In De sensu et sensate, 18: 449a9.  ST, III, q.67, a.6, ad 3. 51  St Cyril of Alexandria. 49 50

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The Soul as a (Constitutional) Monarch As discussed above, the soul betrays that it is not fully immersed in matter, doing so in two seemingly contradictory ways. First, dependence, which is twofold: it requires a body (what is either birth or death after all), and one with requisite operations (and therefore health). In addition, it requires species to know itself, that is, to be actualised – and as we know, here Plato and Aristotle are joined, and in this way so is the soul in terms of operation pre-mortem (pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian) and post-mortem (pre- and during beatitude). Second, independence, again twofold: The soul has its own independent act of being (esse per se absolutum, non dependens a corpore); and operates without an organ. Its independence accommodates or picks out its dependence and vice versa. So, we can argue that a certain operation of the soul transcends matter, yet conversely this very achievement signals and highlights, if we take the time to notice, its sheer dependence on that which it is not, as such. Again, the integral human is from the beginning most dependent and most independent. The former, because it is only partially determined by a general process, that is, its species requires help, not in terms of enhancement, but just in terms of its integral nature, as it was created in grace. Zoologically, the human’s altriciality speaks volumes to this. Yet, this vulnerability is the source of its exceptionalism. As we know, for Aquinas, the soul as form cannot account for the soul as mover, and again the same soul as principle has two effects: forma et motor. That the soul as form, or as essence, is not present to the whole opens up this space for the soul in terms of operation, which in turn signals the dependence on the body, and at the same time its operations that transcend the body – the vulnerability (dependence) and the exceptional excellence, in terms of non-bodily operations (independence) are the same, only looked at from different angles, arguably hendiadys once again. In other words, the human can say the word ‘body’. It can only do so because of the body, yet in not being the body, it can transcend and thereby know it. The word ‘matter’ signifies just such a truth. Pure matter is a contradiction in terms, of course, hence there is strict correlation with form. Here lies the problem or difficulty with materialism. This is most obvious when we realise that ‘matter’ is its own undoing: whispered and an avalanche of contradiction ensues, engulfing every bid for location. Throwing light on the above, having articulated Aquinas’ veneration of the body so successfully elsewhere,52 Carlos Bazán identifies an apparent tension wherein the unity of body and soul is threatened; a threat only removed, he argues, in his more mature writing, namely, in the Summa or partly at the same time in Q de anima. In these later texts, Aquinas is clear that the human was only ever gratuitously immortal in the garden: ‘before the original sin the  See Bazán, “The Highest Encomium of Human Body”, pp. 113–4.

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human body was incorruptible not by nature but by a gift of grace.’53 By contrast in earlier works, such as De malo for instance, incorruptibility is correlative to the soul or form, and corruptibility to matter, which, it would seem, implies a dualistic tendency in his anthropology: ‘insofar as immortality is natural for us (because of our soul), death and corruption [due to our material nature] are unnatural for us.’54 Bazán is correct, at first blush, but given more general considerations or wider parameters this seems not to be the case, quite the opposite. Here are just a few points of consideration. First, we know that it is not the body that sins but the soul. Also, the soul, and by extension the angels’ incorruptibility seems to be more natural, or fitting, but this is easy to misread. First, some angels fell, we are told, and in terms of the supposed conflagration at the end of time when death itself is thrown into the lake of fire, we can suppose the fallen angels, whom the humans will judge, are in a spot of bother, too. Yes, they are naturally incorruptible, zoologically speaking, but not immortal, metaphysically speaking, as we know they are creatures, and in so being, their essence and existence are distinct in real terms. The form of the human, its soul, naturally transcends matter, therefore subsistence is fitting. Yet, this is only a partial anthropological reading of the soul. This soul is such that it cannot but subsist in a truncated manner. Corruptibility correlated to matter, whilst incorruptibility correlated to form is, therefore, purely descriptive in terms of appropriate operations. That the incorruptibility of the human in the garden was by grace is telling, for it shows that all creatures are by God, and not by means of divine jealousy, but rather the sheer generosity of creation. The eschaton of course tells us just that, for corruptibility will end only as we subsist more fully in God. Consequently, Bazán is wrong to extract a philosophical thesis from this – since there isn’t one to be had. Due to the soul’s natural operation it speaks already of transcendence, something birthed by its body or matter, form’s co-principle. Bazán is too quick to read through a modernist lens, wherein being incorruptible is deemed a most obvious good. Well, not for the soul: that the soul can be rendered separate is its corruptibility, metaphysically, something echoed in less extreme situations, for instance, its simultaneous independence from, yet simultaneous dependence on, matter (see above). Indeed, those such as St Irenaeus will argue that if indeed humans had been naturally incorruptible, sin would have been also and redemption seemingly impossible. Death, or better, corruptibility, is not univocal and cannot be for theology, whose economy along with its metaphysics, is one of mixis. After all,  ST I, q.76, a.5 ad.  Q de malo, q.5, a.5, v. 258–270; see B. Carlos Bazán, “A Body for the Human Soul”, Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13th Century, ed. L. Xavier López-Farjeat and J. A. Tellkamp, Paris: Vrin, 2013, pp. 243–77, at p. 274. 53 54

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we are instructed to ‘let the dead bury their dead.’ (Matt. 8:22). In one sense, corruptibility of humans is tied to their matter, but again, only in this very particular sense. To repeat, the soul is corrupted in being separated; it could not, in terms of its operation, be otherwise, for the alternative could only be utter annihilation. Therefore, the form its corruption must take, zoologically speaking, is separation. Yet if one argues for a separated soul that is in some sense, indeed any sense, complete, or untouched by death (the survivalist position, so-called), then dualism is unleashed, and disintegration follows. Theologically this is comparable to the heresy of Docetism, which comes from the Greek dokein (to seem) – we only seem to be human, or to be alive, for the soul’s relationship with the body will be epiphenomenal at best. Bazán again displays his own modernism when underplaying the fact that for Aquinas the matter which he notes as naturally corruptible is a part of the one human. To be consistent he would have to deny Aquinas’ point that it is the soul which transcends in via in terms of its operation, having no need of an organ (yet standing in need of an operational body). Only if Bazán disputes these distinct modalities pre-mortem, which he would not, then he should not misread the different modalities of form and matter post-mortem. Put another way, he would have to deny the soul’s particular ‘talents’ here and now, and thereby indulge in a radical democracy wherein, for instance, the sensitive was able to do what the rational soul does. He does not do this; hence he is begging the question when he does so post-mortem. In short, his zoology is truncated, and is not theological enough, lacking the requisite epoché; here, suspending our natural understanding of life and death.

Seeing God and Our Neighbour In relation to the beatific vision, something comes to the fore, something of radical consequence that throws light on the above. Aristotle asked: in what does happiness consist? For Aquinas, our final end is God, therefore objectively speaking, this brings the appetites to rest. Aristotle might have understood this, we can speculate. Aquinas, however, deems this Aristotelian notion of beatitude imperfect. Why? Because the speculative sciences, in this case contemplation, cannot fulfil all of happiness. We do not simply want to know that God exists, which we now do, but the human wishes to know His very essence. We desire something which is beyond our finite capacities. For Aquinas, such an impossibility is satisfied by way of God’s grace, unsurprisingly. In the Summa Aquinas asks whether the body is required for the happiness of man.55 We know by now the answer is yes. In terms of perfect beatitude, though, a peculiar implication  See ST, I, II, q.4, a.5.

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creeps in. Perfection can belong to something in two ways: by being part of its essence, or by being required for its perfect existence. The body, of course, cannot be considered as belonging to the essence of beatitude objectively speaking, for that essence is God. But the body is required subjectively speaking, for we say this contemplation is ours, hence after the resurrection beatitude is increased not intensively, but extensively. The human as composite is so integral that even if the separated soul enjoys the vision of God, the body extends this beatitude. It is now the human’s beatitude. Arguably, for Aquinas this is a philosophical position, insofar as he has argued by way of hylomorphism for the inadequacy of the separated soul. Then he makes the surprising move by arguing, from a theological point of view, that the full human brings with it its many lived dimensions – friends, family, and so on. God is the object of perfect beatitude, so any such dimensions cannot be involved in this objective essence. Yet, Aquinas does then say that this society contributes to the ‘wellbeing of beatitude’ – ad bene esse beatitudinis.56 Consonant with this, Augustine asserted that the human intellectual soul cannot see God’s substance the way angels do and speculated that such inferiority results from the soul’s ‘natural appetite’ to govern the body. Desiderium or inclinatio ad corpus prevents the soul from fully aspiring toward God as long as it is not in control of the body,57 or as Aquinas says, ‘Perfection of beatitude cannot exist if perfection of nature is lacking […] This is why the separated soul cannot attain the ultimate perfection of beatitude.’58 The beatific vision of God per essentiam is a gift for the glorified human, not the body, nor the soul, and yet not even for the resurrected human on their own. The soul, as we know, yearns for its body, its grace overflowing into the body, and the grace of the resurrected person overflows too. ‘So, if there were only one soul enjoying God it would be blessed, without having a neighbour to love. But, given a neighbour, love of that neighbour follows from perfect love of God. Consequently, friendship is related to perfect beatitude as accompanying it.’59 Is this not Augustine’s idea of the mutual company in God?60 Body and soul are born together, and in some sense die together – they are most certainly ‘friends’. Yes, for Aquinas the soul lives on, but does so in an unnatural mode of being, a broken union, which some would render a divorce, rather than catastrophic separation. Surely, that’s why Christ wept for Lazarus?  ST, I–II, 4, 8, c. See Bázan, “The Highest Encomium of Human Body”, p. 116.  See Saint Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, trans. John Hammond Taylor, vols. 41–42 of Ancient Christian Writers. The Works of the Fathers in Translation, ed. Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawler, New York NY: Paulist Press, 1982, vol. 2, Book 12, Chapter 35, § 68, pp. 228–29. 58  QDP, q.5, a.10 59  ST 1–2, q. 4, a. 8, ad 3. 60  See On Genesis, Book VIII. Also see On the City of God, Book 22. 56 57

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‘The separation of the body is said to hold the soul back from tending with all its might to the vision of the divine essence. For the soul desires to enjoy God in such a way that the enjoyment also may overflow into the body, as far as possible. And therefore, as long as it enjoys God without the fellowship of the body, its appetite is at rest in such a way that it would still wish the body to attain its share.’61 Or, ‘Man’s beatitude principally consists in an act of the soul from which it overflows onto the body. Nevertheless, there will be a certain beatitude of our body insofar as it will see God in creatures that can be sensed, and especially in the body of Christ.’62 The use of the word flow here is crucial, for it is such reunion and the beatific vision with creation itself being a result of the diffusion of the Good (bonum diffusivum sui), and even more certainly ex nihilo. ‘Hence it is said by some people, and not inappropriately, that “the good, as such, is diffusive”, because the better a thing is, the more does it diffuse its goodness to remote beings’,63 (just as it recalls the fittingness (convenientia) of the Incarnation). Yet for Aquinas the disembodied soul enjoys the full beatitude (qualitatively speaking) yet as mentioned, it is extended (that is, quantitatively) after the reunion of soul and body.64 Interestingly, unlike Plotinus, for example, Aquinas insists that even when experiencing union with God, souls are not absorbed; they do not lose themselves. Indeed, both angels and separated souls can cognise other things, doing so without thereby being distracted from their experience of God.65 This is the case because experience of God and other cognitive acts are of a different order. The resurrected, glorious body of the blessed will be adapted to the state of beatitude, apt to rejoice in the beatific vision. Delight or pleasure is not required for beatitude, Aquinas tells us. Nevertheless, in the same way that the grace of youth results from youth itself, pleasure is a concomitant of the beatific vision.66 For Augustine, we as creatures will perhaps see each other and rejoice together joined in one society with God.67 In the fourteenth book of Paradiso, waiting for the resurrection entails longing for body, above all the mother’s. Bodies, therefore, are not mere adjuncts to the visio Dei but instruments of another vision, that of the persons the blessed loved before death reduced them all to disembodied souls. Restored flesh gives beatitude its fullness, especially as it allows communion with the mother: ‘So prompt and eager seemed to me one chorus and the other to say ‘Amen!’ that well they showed desire for dead bodies  – maybe not for themselves, but for the mamas, the fathers and the others dear to  ST I–II, q.4, a.5, ad.4. Sent., dist. 49, q.2, ad.6. 63 SCG III, c.24, 8. 64 See Aquinas, ST, 1a–2ae, Q. 4, art. 6, 2:606–7. 65  See QQ, 9.4.2. 66  ST, 1a–2ae, Q. 4, art. 1–2, 2:604. 67  Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, Book 8, Chapter 25, § 47, p. 66. 61

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them before becoming imperishable flames.’68 Similarly, for Aquinas, a societas amicorum might contribute to the accomplishment of beatitude; nonetheless, the essential glory of the beatific vision resides in God, not in humanity.69

Conclusion The above discussion of Aquinas’ view of the soul and the body is an exercise in avoiding a domestication of anthropology, an outcome of an impoverished imagination. Regarding impoverished imaginations, the angels offer a telling metaphysical and theological lesson, in terms of theology’s paradox or epoché, one that often goes unnoticed. When the women discover the empty tomb, the missing body of Christ, they are told: ‘Do not be amazed (ἐκθαμβεῖσθε). You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here.’ (Mark 16:6). Similarly, recall the passage from Acts (1:11), wherein Christ is ‘lifted into Heaven’. Two angels then turn up and chastise the onlookers: ‘Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?’ The impoverished imagination suffers a distorted wonderment. What would it entail, after all, to look up to ‘see’ the ascension? How high would Jesus be? Likewise, the command of not to be amazed, and the parochial references, inoculates against the idea of cheap miracle. Echoing this sensibility, when Christ encountered the women at the tomb, the casualness is telling: ‘chairete’, ‘good morning’, the lack of drama is dramatic, as it were. There is here, revolution, yet fittingness. This resurrected person is, after all, God incarnate, for whom creation is, yet is the same person that cried at the tomb of Lazarus. Once again, we have the marriage of ascent and descent. Yet there is no flattening, the removal of tension or specificity. The angels speak using geographical terms. It is not the Christ, but Jesus of Nazareth, likewise, in Acts, it is men of Galilee, just as further in the same verse of Mark the angels tell the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee. Most telling is that the resurrected Jesus appears as a man not as some figure all in white and glowing, as with the transfiguration. The angels at the tomb are dazzling, but not Jesus, even if he no doubt does some peculiar things. On the one hand eating broiled fish, just as he rose with his scars, validating history, and on the other, passing through walls. This is our epoché, as it sets our natural understandings adrift, and precludes domestication. Interestingly, this is analogous to how Plato employs a mix of language, colloquial and otherwise, to characterise participation arguably to wrongfoot our temptation to reify, technically or otherwise.70 By so doing,  Paradiso, Book 14, ll. 61–66, p. 188.  See ST, 1a–2ae, Q. 4, art. 8, 2:608. 70  For example, metalambanein, metalepsis (have or get a share of, participation, sharing); metechein (to have of, partake, share in), methexis, metaschesis (participation); meteinai (to 68 69

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the mixis is kept in play, for here, methexis cannot settle down to announce one thing. To conclude, this is the marriage of transcendence and immanence, soul and body, time and eternity; the very paradox of theology which Aquinas’ understanding of the soul embodies. We are indeed stuck in the middle (metaxu), and this is our anthropology, just as it is our metaphysics of mixis.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P. M. edita, Rome: Commisio Leonina, 1882. Aquinas, Thomas, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia t. 7/2. Commentum in quartum librum Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi, Parma: Petrus Fiaccadoris, 1858. Aquinas, Thomas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, ed. P. Mandonnet and M. F. Moos, Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1929–47. Aquinas, Thomas, S. Thomas Aquinatis In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis exposition, ed. M. R. Cathala and R. M. Spiazzi, Rome: Marietti, 1971. Aquinas, Thomas, S. Thomae Aquinatis Quaestiones disputatae, t. 2. Quaestiones disputatae de potential, ed. P. M. Pession, Rome: Marietti, 1965. Aquinas, Thomas, S. Thomae Aquinatis Super Epistolas S. Pauli lectura, t. 1. Super primam Epistolam ad Corintios lectura, ed. R. Cai, Rome: Marietti, 1953. Aquinas, Thomas, S. Thomae Aquinatis Super librum De Causis exposition, ed. H. D. Saffrey, Louvain: Société Philosophique, 1954. Augustine, Saint, De Genesi ad litteram, trans. John Hammond Taylor, vols. 41–42 of Ancient Christian Writers. The Works of the Fathers in Translation, ed. Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawler, New York NY: Paulist Press, 1982. Bazán, B. Carlos, “The Highest Encomium of Human Body”, Littera, sensus, sententia. Studi in onore del prof. C. J. Vansteenkiste, ed. A. Lobato, Milan: Studia Universitatis S. Thomae de Urbe 33, 1991, pp. 99–116. Bazán, B. Carlos, “The Human Soul. Form and Substance? Thomas Aquinas’ Critique of Eclectic Aristotelianism”, Archives D’Histoire et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 64 (1997), pp. 95–126. Bazán, B. Carlos, “A Body for the Human Soul”, Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13th Century, ed. L. Xavier López-Farjeat and J. A. Tellkamp, Paris: Vrin, 2013, pp. 243–77. Blankenhorn, Bernhard, The Mystery of Union with God. Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. Brower, Jeffrey E., Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kahm, Nicholas, Aquinas on Emotion’s Participation in Reason, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019.

share, add a share to – Plato does not use the later substantive metousia), metadidonai (give a share in); koinōnein, koinōnia (sharing, communion), etc.

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Pasnau, Robert, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ratzinger, Joseph, Eschatology. Death and Eternal Life, 2nd edition, trans. Michael Waldstein, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Spencer, Mark K., “A Reexamination of the Hylomorphic Theory of Death”, The Review of Metaphysics, 63 (2010), pp. 843–70.

Abbreviations of Thomas Aquinas’ Works Cited: EE In De anima In 1 Cor In DC In In Phys In Sent Q. de anima QDSC Q de malo QDP DV QQ SCG ST

De ente et essentia Sententia super De anima Expositio super Primam Epistolam S. Pauli ad Corinthios Expositio super librum De causis De sensu et sensate Sententia super Physica Scriptum super libros Sententiarum Quaestio disputata de anima Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis Questiones disputate De Malo Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei Quaestiones disputatae de veritate Quaestiones quodlibetales Summa contra Gentiles Summa theologiae

Part VII: Futures

‘The wound where light enters’ A ‘Common Word’ for Being Human in Islam and Christianity Michael Kirwan SJ and Ahmad Achtar The present essay acknowledges the importance of theological anthropology and the ‘need to develop a new approach that takes into account other religious traditions and their understanding of the human being’.1 It investigates, specifically, the resources which allow Islam and Christianity to develop a mutual understanding of humanity, casting new light on each other’s traditions, and moving towards finding a ‘common word’. Among these resources is the ‘mimetic theory’ of the French American cultural theorist, René Girard (1923–2015). From the outset, we need to recognise an inherent tension in the concept of a ‘theological anthropology’. The venerable discipline of ‘theology’ classically entailed a unitary account of how the human being stands before God; ‘anthropology’, a younger, secular discipline, seeks to discern the immense diversity of human cultures, behaviours and beliefs. As a reaction, no doubt, to the notorious hegemony of western imperialist paradigms, present-day anthropologists seem to be allergic to any kind of general statement about human nature. Can these two trajectories be held together: the theologian’s concern to give a unitary description of the human condition, and the anthropologist’s resistance to all such descriptions? Louis-Marie Chauvet warns theologians about ensuring they are sufficiently disconnected from their faith concerns when engaging with anthropology. Their intellectual habitus can cause them to work unconsciously with a crypto-theology; specifically, when addressing categories such as the ‘sacred’, ‘magic’, and ‘sacrifice’.2 The third of these he refers to as the ‘Girardian’ temptation, and we shall return to it at the end of this essay. To begin, we sketch out the broad contours of Christian, and then Islamic, theological anthropology. In the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis, God declares ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26). Worth 1 This emphasis was the stated aim of the conference at the University of Tübingen, “Theological Anthropology in Interreligious Perspective”, 7th-9th March 2018. 2  Louis-Marie Chauvet, “When the Theologian Turns Anthropologist”, Keeping Faith in Practice. Aspects of Catholic Pastoral Theology, ed. John Sweeney et al., London: SCM Press, 2010, pp. 148–62, at pp. 148–9.

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noting is the duality of this phrase, which in patristic theological reflection is understood to mean two aspects of human nature. Our creation in God’s image is a given, an inalienable dignity; and yet we are also called, dynamically, to grow in our likeness to God. Human nature is both static and dynamic, both gift and task. The story then follows as to how the divine image in humanity, the imago Dei, is compromised or disfigured, as a result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the first, ‘original’ sin, when they eat the fruit which had been forbidden them. The catastrophic ‘Fall’, mankind’s alienation from God, is itself reversed in the life and work of Christ. Paul dramatises this when he speaks of Christ as the ‘new Adam’, whose obedience to God cancels and repairs the rebellion of the first Adam. In Christ, the potential for human flourishing in fellowship with God is restored. Perhaps surprisingly, throughout the history of the church there has never been one single way of describing this sequence of events. A rich variety of images and expressions can be brought under the single heading of ‘salvation’. But the metaphors themselves (ransom, justification, liberation, sacrifice, adoption, etc.) differ widely in their depiction of the interplay of human and divine agency.3 There is a two-fold challenge to find fresh expressions for the present age. Firstly, many of the traditional accounts and metaphors are problematic, even for Christians. Secondly, in the contemporary world there is a multiplicity of possible descriptions of the humanum. The Christian narrative is just one among many versions – religious and non-religious – of human nature and destiny. A theological anthropology, adequate for the present day, needs to acknowledge this diversity. If there is no single ‘Christian anthropology’, the same is true for Islamic perspectives on the human. Islam is ‘structurally anthropocentric’, insofar as only human beings receive revelation, according to the prevalent view in Islamic theology’4, and only human beings are capable of falling away from God. In his survey of contemporary anthropological themes in Islam,5 Damian Howard cites Jeppe S. Jensen: ‘That humankind alone requires guidance makes the Qur’an itself a sign of his distinctiveness and its contents a full-blown normative anthropology’.6 The ‘Qur’anic fact’ is central; therefore, though as Zekirija Sejdini makes clear, allowance must be made for the different contexts of 3  Options range from total human passivity – as in the so-called ‘ransom’ model, according to which humans held captive by sin and the devil are set free by Christ – to an ‘exemplarist’ model, whereby Christ’s significance is limited to his being an example of holiness and fidelity. Neither of these images is adequate within mainstream Christian theology, which seeks to be true to both God’s causal saving initiative, and to an actively co-operative human response. 4  Although according to a minority view, animals too receive divine revelation and even have their own prophets. See Tim Winter, “‘Nations like Yourselves’. Some Muslim Debates over Qur’an 6:38”, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 163–72. 5  Damian Howard, Being Human in Islam. The Impact of the Evolutionary Wordview, London: Routledge, 2011. 6  Jeppe S. Jensen, “Towards Contemporary Islamic Concepts of the Person”, Concepts of

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individual Qur’anic passages. Sejdini and Achtar each grounds his survey upon Qur’anic accounts of the creation of Adam and Eve, specifically suras 2, 20 and 7.7 According to this testimony, humanity is endowed by God with a special dignity in creation. As with the Genesis narrative, man is appointed as governor or representative of God on earth; however, moral weakness leaves him vulnerable to being deflected or hindered from this task of stewardship. The priority of strict monotheism entails an ontological humbling of the human being, as well as her privileging and exaltation. The divine ‘monopoly’ on Being can seem to deny any reality to the non-divine including the humanum. In the Qur’an we find a ‘semantic opposition’ between ‘man’ and ‘God’- there is no hint, for example, of the imago Dei trope which we find in Genesis; the trope is, however, found in the Hadith literature, but our treatment here is restricted to the Qur’an. The dignity of the human arises from the unique function assigned to him, rather than from his creation as such. As God’s vicegerent, man is set at the pinnacle of God’s creation; at the same time, he is humbled by the precariousness and even scandal of this entrusting (Q 2:30; witness the indignation of the angels). This commission is, in short, a risky business, and requires the giving of the Qur’an as necessary guidance for vulnerable humanity.8 We find, then, both similarities and divergences between the Biblical and Qur’anic accounts. Is it possible that the ‘mimetic theory’ of René Girard can account for these, in a way that will stimulate exchange and mutual learning between the respective faith traditions? Girard, in his analysis of sacralised violence, made no secret of the importance of Biblical revelation, as both source and confirmation of his two anthropological insights. The first, is the mimetic (therefore potentially conflictual) nature of desire; the second, is the tendency of human societies to resolve mimetic conflicts spontaneously, by the mobilisation of the majority against a marginal individual or group. Here is an all too human paradox. Aggression derives from deep-seated needs for ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’; but when two subjects protect or assert their identity over against each other, the differences between them dissolve. They become what Girard describes as enemy ‘doubles’ or ‘mimetic twins’. In such a crisis, where the need to reassert some kind of difference is urgent, the group spontaneously finds a way of doing so: by identifying and expelling, or even annihilating, a marginal individual or group. The communal tension and anger are projected and vented upon the ‘scapegoat’. Such is the intensity of the peace which ensues after this cathartic aggression, that it seems to have come Person in Religion and Thought, ed. H. G. Kippenberg et al., Berlin: Monton de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 177–216; p. 190; cited in Howard, Being Human, p. 26. 7 Zekirija Sejdini, “Islamic Anthropology, based on Key Passages in the Qur’an”, Mimetic Theory and Islam. “The Wound Where Light Enters”, ed. Michael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 31–8; Ahmad Achtar, “Adam and Eve in the Qur’an. A Mimetic Perspective”, Mimetic Theory and Islam, ed. Kirwan and Achtar, pp. 39–46. 8  Howard, Being Human, p. 24.

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from such ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ the human protagonists. The victim himself is perceived as the divine source of this new tranquility. Such, in other words, is the origin of religious transcendence; a general argument which seems to follow in the spirit of Émile Durkheim, though is significantly different. The JudeoChristian revelation tends towards an exposure of this ‘false’ transcendence, in the name of the ‘genuine’ sacred. The true God is utterly beyond and outside the vicious human interactions of ‘butchers pretending to be sacrificers’. Although Girard’s ground-breaking work La violence et le sacré reads like yet another reductionist, atheistic critique of religion, it is a critique which issues from the standpoint of committed Christian belief. We assume in this essay the general serviceability of Girard’s ideas. Robert Hamerton-Kelly stressed their contemporary relevance in 1992, that if ‘the overriding fact of our time is violence’, then a theory seeking to make sense of violence will be more likely to get to the heart of what is important. ‘[T]here is a congruence between our times, our texts, and our tradition that makes for a powerful interpretive constellation.’9 More than twenty years later, Rowan Williams has asserted that Girard’s work ‘continues to inspire and exasperate in equal measure’, because the urgent task of gathering the evidence which will support his grand claims, remains incomplete. Careful work is ‘badly needed’ on the frontiers between Girardian theory and other currents of critical thought – biology and neuroscience, anthropology, war and conflict studies. In the meantime, ‘the arbitrariness of “sacral” violence is harder and harder to conceal for those who reflect seriously on our world’.10 While Girard wrote as an explicitly Christian thinker, the present essay seeks to review Girard’s work on a broader canvas than that of Christian theology. We have noted the convergences, with regard to Biblical and Qur’anic texts: the Genesis account of creation, and the creation of Adam and Eve as recounted in sura 2 and elsewhere. Achtar identifies envy – an inordinate love of mortal things, when the individual has strayed from God – as the source of other moral weaknesses.11 A reading of the prohibition in the garden of Eden, by which eating the forbidden fruit will make humans like ‘kings’, opens up a mimetic analysis. In the absence of existing kings, the first couple can only ‘model’ their desires on God, and what they have witnessed of God’s sovereign power. Two basic desires  – for immortality, and for kingly power (dominion/wealth) are at work. But as Achtar affirms, it is not their desire for transcendence which is condemned, but

 9  Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence. Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992; p. 5. 10  Rowan Williams, “Foreword”, Mimesis and Atonement. René Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation, ed. Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden, New York NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. xiii–xv; xv. 11  Achtar, “Adam and Eve”, p. 45.

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an idolatrous self-affirmation which causes them to fulfil this desire apart from and without God’s guidance. Sejdini coheres with this reading of what Girardian theory calls ‘metaphysical mimesis’ and argues for its antidote: a belief in the resurrection and an afterlife, but also a clear understanding of the nature of property rights in Islamic thought.12 The distinction between absolute property and entrusted goods  – which underpins man’s vocation to stewardship of the created order – speaks to this fatal blurring of the lines between ‘having’ and ‘being’. We go astray when we mistakenly believe that selfishly grasping an object or quality for our exclusive use will enable us to achieve stable existential fulfilment. Here then is a convergence between Christian and Islamic (Qur’anic) understandings of human beings and how they have fallen short of their destiny. Indeed, the idea of ‘falling short’ of a goal appears common to the two traditions: the notion of hamartia, familiar to us as the ‘flaw’ which brings down the Greek tragic hero, literally pictures an arrow missing its target. Can this common intuition become a ‘common word’? Is it possible to incorporate this intuition into a more formal theological-anthropological framework? A prominent theologian – not a Girardian – has declared the two-fold imperative of religion: to enable us to resist idolatry, and to negotiate our desires.13 The first imperative is clearly a ‘theological’ concern, while the second relates directly to human nature as such. Girardian theory insists on the link between the two. The mystery of man’s blindness toward God, and our refusal to offer God true worship and obedience, are rooted in our entangled and misplaced desires, and our grotesque elevation of each other into violent ‘gods’. This ‘functionalist’ definition of religion, therefore, needs to be combined with a ‘hermeneutic of violence’, such as the notion of an ‘Abrahamic Revolution’ provides. According to Wolfgang Palaver, the concept implies a break with archaic sacrificial culture, which is simultaneously a reorientation of desire and a discovery of the genuine, as opposed to ‘false’, sacred.14 This implies and requires a convergence of readings: of Jewish with Christian texts and traditions, but also with Islamic ones. Jewish Girardian scholars have articulated such a convergence;15 but we await affirmation from Muslim interlocutors of similar correspondences in Islamic texts and traditions.16  Sejdini, “Islamic Anthropology”, p. 37.  Nicholas Lash (University of Cambridge), in an informal conversation. 14 Wolfgang Palaver, “The Abrahamic Revolution”, Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schink, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, pp. 259–78. 15  For example, Sandor Goodhart’s diachronic readings of Hebrew texts, and his attention to ‘anti-sacrificial’ substitutions and displacements; see the essays in Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution. Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity, ed. Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart, Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. 16  On Islamic conversation with mimetic theory, see the essays in Kirwan and Achtar, Mi12 13

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A Common Word: the ‘Abrahamic Revolution’ In the aftermath of tensions related to the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, Muslim scholars sought to identify a ‘common word’ between Christians and Muslims. The joint document A Common Word Between Us and You identifies common ground in the Two Greatest Commandments: ‘the Unity of God, love of Him, and love of the neighbour’. A Common Word is clear about the geo-political context which makes co-existence between Christianity and Islam so essential: ‘If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace […] thus our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.’17 The document concludes with a citation of Q 5:48, concerning the necessity of a ‘positive’ mimesis for overcoming fratricidal rivalry: So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill […]. ‘So vie one with another in good works. Unto God ye will all return, and He will then inform you of that wherein ye differ’ (Q 5:48).18

Here is the ‘powerful interpretive constellation’ referred to by Hamerton-Kelly, a congruence between ‘our times, our texts, and our tradition’; except that here, ‘traditions’ is in the plural. As noted above, the A Common Word initiative arises out of a particular moment of tension and seeming impasse between Christianity and Islam. This unfortunate episode should not, however, obscure the remarkable history of post-Vatican II dialogue between Christians and other faiths. Open-textured practices, such as comparative theology and scriptural reasoning, are examples of the kind of co-operative initiative in which a Girardian hermeneutic of sacralised violence might find a theoretical and programmatic home. A prominent context for this hermeneutic has been the notion of an ‘Abrahamic revolution’, according to which there is, in the Qur’an, a similar trajectory to that which Girard has traced in the Bible. The notion echoes Karl Jaspers’ doctrine of an ‘axial age’;19 the ethical and spiritual breakthrough in

metic Theory and Islam; also, Adam Ericksen, “Tawhid. The Oneness of God and the Desire for the Good”, in Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Palaver and Schink, pp. 401–12; Rüdiger Lohlker, “Islam. Law and Violence (and Non-Violence)”, in Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Palaver and Schink, pp. 413–26. 17  A Common Word Between Us and You, 2012 [Fifth Anniversary edition], MABDA, English Monograph Series 20: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. http://www. acommonword.com (accessed 2 August 2020). 18  A Qur’an REF; Common Word internet REF A Common Word document: https://www. acommonword.com/the-acw-document/ (accessed 2 August 2020). 19  Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.

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question here is the refusal to ‘sacralise’ the violence of human groups asserting identity over against one another, and a partisanship for the innocent victim. After careful exegesis of Girard’s rather inconsistent remarks on Islam, Palaver argues for its inclusion in the Abrahamic revolutionary paradigm.20 Islam shares in the revelatory power that which proponents of mimetic theory have initially located in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The commonality of the three faiths is their shared experience of an ‘exodus’ from archaic religion, and a partisanship for the victim which constitutes ‘the greatest cultural revolution in history’. What is the evidence in the Islamic sources? Palaver highlights (as does A Common Word) the importance of Q 5:48. He notes also the common witness of the Bible and the Qur’an in the example of two patriarchs: Abraham himself, with the Akedah or binding of Isaac (Genesis 27; Q sura 37), and the story of Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37–45; sura 12). The Akedah marks, quite simply, the point in human history where a breakaway from human sacrifice  – the ‘archaic’ tradition – was made possible. What Girard had described as the story of this ‘single dynamic movement away from sacrifice’ involves the substitution of animals – in this case the ram – as an implicit prohibition on the immolation of infants.21 Palaver cites the novelist Thomas Mann, who describes a shift from the ‘stupidity before God’ – Gottesdummheit – to an ‘intelligence before God’, Gottesklugheit.22 The Qur’anic verse (Q 37:106) goes even further than the Biblical text, asserting that Abraham had only dreamt God’s commanding him to kill his son; and that this dream was ‘obviously a trial’. The story of Joseph illustrates even more clearly the difference between archaic religion and the Biblical perspective. Girard highlights the contrast by comparing Joseph’s fate with that of Oedipus.23 These are similar accounts of abandonment and scapegoating, even to the nature of the accusations made against Oedipus and Joseph. But their destinies are very different. Oedipus is first expelled, then divinised – what Girard calls a ‘double transference’; but for Joseph, this mythological process never gets under way. Joseph is rehabilitated and becomes a figure of real, not mythological, reconciliation. In both the cases of Abraham and of Joseph, God is emphatically placed outside and above the vortex of human rivalry and violence. God is dissociated from the demand for human immolation, while Joseph’s insistence on God’s mercy is emphatic. He makes clear to his brothers that he is still human, and not a divinised victim: ‘Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God?’24 The  Palaver, “The Abrahamic Revolution”.  René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 239. 22  Palaver, “The Abrahamic Revolution”, p. 261. 23  Girard, Things Hidden, p. 240. 24  There is a marked difference from the Biblical accounts, however, insofar as the psychological dynamic of the two episodes is flattened out, or ‘de-dramatised’. The Qur’anic accounts have no interest in the agonised decision of Abraham, or the murderous jealousies of Joseph’s 20 21

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‘Abrahamic revolution’ consists, therefore, in the reversal of the imperative of archaic religion, its demand for human sacrifice. When this idolatrous misconception of the divine is removed, the ‘genuine’ sacred, the God who is utterly beyond the nexus of human projections of violence, comes into view. Reza ShahKazemi writes of an ‘ontology of mercy’ underlying both the interpretation of jihad and the Qur’anic understanding of Jesus.25 There is, however, a ‘scorpion’s tale’ to the Abrahamic revolution. A heightened awareness of the innocent victim which is not accompanied by reconciliation and forgiveness can quickly turn into a righteous mob-hunt. This revolutionary consciousness cannot be reduced to plain sympathy for victims, a sort of proto-political correctness. If it is, then the cycle of ‘righteous vengeance’ remains unbroken. Muslims and Christians alike can be tempted to the conviction that we are by nature strangers to the violence of our ancestors, risking therefore a ‘return of the repressed’. A temptation, it must be said, that exists equally for secular modernity, as for the monotheistic faiths.

‘Being Human’ in Islam and Christianity The proposed conversation between Islam and Christianity does not take place in an ahistorical vacuum. Each faith tradition has had to reassess its perspectives on the humanum in the light of secular modernity, and particularly of scientific critiques which, at face value, seem to challenge and even repudiate a religious world view. Secular modernity is the ‘third party’ in the conversation. How adequate, therefore, are Christian and Islamic accounts of the humanum in the face of the evolutionary paradigm – the dominant anthropological discourse of modernity? Damian Howard traces the contours of Islam’s encounter with the ‘evolutionary imaginary’. The term is adapted from Charles Taylor, who in A Secular Age speaks of the ‘social imaginary’ as a widely-accepted general worldview, more extensive than the formalised beliefs of an intellectual elite.26 This is important, since the distinction enables us to discern contradictions or tensions between a theory (such as evolution) and its appropriation by people at large. Howard’s study investigates Islam’s ‘anthropological imaginary’, and how this has been shaped by evolutionary theory. He begins by noting the response of Catholic Christianity to the challenge of evolution: an ultimately benign story of ‘resistance to, accommodation of, and eventually reinforcement of certain evobrothers. To attend to these would be merely to distract our attention from the only ‘star’ of the drama: God, who draws the harmful intentions of the other actors into his own beneficent plan. 25 Reza Shah-Kazemi, “Jesus in the Qur’an. Selfhood and Compassion. An Akbari Perspective”, Sufism. Love & Wisdom, ed. J.-L. Michon and R. Gaetani, Bloomington IN: World Wisdom, 2006, pp. 217–35. 26  Howard, Being Human, pp. 10–11, 18–20; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

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lutionary motifs.’27 This assimilation is made possible by a number of theological paradigm shifts in the twentieth century. Above all, the transformed understanding of divine action in the world, which we find in the Jesuit thinkers Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner has enabled a theological outlook which is not simply compatible with the evolutionary imaginary, but stylistically congruent with it.28 Science and religion, as it were, find common utterance. Above all, the doctrine of Christ becomes the doctrinal pierre d’attente, which means that ‘real dialogue with evolutionary thought is taking place at the very heart of Christian logic, a conversation which can finally yield a rich imaginary, comprising both religious and scientific elements’.29 This development within Catholic thought is significant, insofar as much of the Christian-Muslim dialogue around evolution has featured Catholic interlocutors. Howard notes, of course, the complexity of this encounter: the ‘evolutionary imaginary’ has been generated by a largely anti-religious western scientific culture which poses a challenge for all religious believers. Western Christians have by and large managed to negotiate this challenge, as we have seen. For Muslims, however, this same culture has been experienced as traumatically colonial and hegemonic, as well as antireligious. Howard presents the history of this troubled interaction as a series of four ‘foundational moments’, that is, dramatic political and historical situations which shape human imaginaries and ground new configurations of consciousness.30 These are phases of: traumatic colonial confrontation; of spiritualist optimism in the early twentieth century (under the influence of Henri Bergson); of apocalyptic despair in post-war Europe; and of post-colonial Islamic assertiveness.31 With this history in mind, Howard attempts to triangulate Islamic religious thought, the evolutionary world view, and the nature of the human. Does mimetic theory help with this task of triangulation? Girard devoted the first third of his important book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World to the question of hominisation; though as Dumouchel points out, the issue of our species’ origin arises for Girard as a secondary question, after his earlier work on sacrifice.32 Questions about our origins, or about human uniqueness, 27 Howard,

Being Human, p. 20.  Ibid, p. 22; see also: Karl Rahner, Hominisation. The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem, London: Burns and Oates, 1965; Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York NY: Harper Perennial, 1976 [1959]. 29  Howard, Being Human, p. 22. 30  Ibid., p. 7. 31 Howard sees Henri Bergson, and his appropriation by Islamic thinkers, as significant for the Islamic reception of the evolutionary paradigm. Benoit Chantre compares Bergson and Girard, in terms of ‘the messianic moment’. Perhaps attention to Bergson may be valuable as a mediating figure in the construction of a ‘common word’? See Benoit Chantre, “The Messianic Moment: Bergson and Girard”, in Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Palaver and Schink, pp. 87–110. 32  Paul Dumouchel, “An Essay on Hominization. Current Themes, Girardian-Darwinian 28

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cannot be asked separately from ‘what is the origin of culture?’ or ‘where has the distinction between good and evil come from?’ There is a whole set of traits and behaviours unique to humans which requires explanation; concentrating on one factor, such as larger brain size or increased cognitive capacity, for example, is simply too narrow an approach. Here, says Dumouchel, is the advantage of the mimetic theory and its ambitious scope. All this stems from the victim as ‘the first object of non-instinctual attention, the first symbol’,33 a symbol which represents the whole traumatic sequence of events, the crisis and its resolution, which are only partially understood by the participants but which, after many repetitions, become encoded in human society. The conditions are thus provided for a process of co-evolution of genes and culture – conditions thought to be necessary for the rapid evolution of human language and the brain. Girard begins then with an undefined, exceedingly significant single symbol, a symbol that will gradually be turned into a ‘system’ as its various significations are separated and distinguished: The main advantage of the explanation put forward by mimetic theory is precisely that it comes as part of a package, one that intimately relates the origin of symbolic thought with the origin of religion (or the sacred), rituals, myths, rules, moral distinctions, and indeed all basic human institutions. That is its greatest strength, because all these things are common to us and to us only.34

A series of conferences in Cambridge in 2011–14 sought to explore the possible convergences between Girard and Darwinian theory.35 The key question, ‘how we became human’ was complemented by another: ‘can we survive our origins?’ The argument is a stark one: the expanded mimetic capacities which enabled hominisation (‘how we became human’), are now precisely the behaviours which, if continued, will bring about our destruction. The continuance of our species depends on us being re-wired, as it were; away from the kind of mimesis which has brought us to where we are, but which is now positively dangerous. No conceivable pattern of continued adaptation can help us: humanity has reached a ‘tipping-point’ in the escalating scale of global rivalry and violence. What is called for now is not ‘adaptation’ for survival, but ethical conversion.

Approaches”, The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, ed. James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 13–8, at p. 16. 33  Ibid., p. 17. 34  Ibid., p. 18. 35  Pierpaoli Antonello and Paul Gifford (eds.), How We Became Human, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015; also, Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford (eds.), Can We Survive Our Origins?, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015.

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Correspondences In this search for a ‘common word among us’, we have tried to heed Louis-Marie Chauvet’s warning for the ‘theologian who turns anthropologist’, above all concerning the ‘Girardian’ tempation. Chauvet’s guardedness towards mimetic theory concerns its overly strident critique of ‘sacrifice’ (a position, to be sure, which Girard amended in his later writing). Theologians in general, and those under Girard’s influence in particular, need to be wary: But by reason of the mental structure (what the Scholastics would have called the habitus) that theology has given them and that persuades them to place in dialogue with the one and only God a generic and only human being, i. e. a being whose universality is conceptually established at the price of crushing its characteristic socio-historical mediations, they must remain particularly vigilant in order not to adopt over-hastily a general theory that follows their reflexes and their Christian self-interest.36

This warning can be extended to the present discussion, where the zeal of mimetic theorists to discover affinities between Islam and Christianity can have disastrously distorting consequences. Of course, to be truly attentive to Chauvet, we would need to address ‘the uncommon word among us’ – the no-go areas between Christians and Muslims. Most centrally, the person, nature and work of Jesus Christ remains a point of intractable divergence – both for the dialogue in general, and specifically for mimetic theory. Theologians from both faiths can converse about the ‘old Adam’, based on Genesis 1–3 and on the Qur’anic accounts of the creation of humanity. But what can be said about the ‘New Adam’? In an interview in 2008, Girard declared that ‘[i]n Islam the most important thing is missing: a Cross.’37 The Cross is indeed, necessary for Christians. It is the means by which the true face of God, as victim, is revealed. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, God’s love and power on behalf of the victim are released into the world. And yet Islam, through Rumi, its great poet and mystic, also speaks of the wound where light enters in. What kind of light does Girardian theory shed, if any; and how? Is it a sweeping searchlight, or should we regard it as a set of carefully placed spotlights, illuminating specific texts and situations? This essay has assumed the latter. We have sought to put mimetic theory to work; specifically, to help Christianity and Islam find a ‘common word’ on the nature of the human. Paths of exploration have included, firstly, the A Common Word Among Us initiative itself, with its theological-anthropological assumptions, and secondly, the notion of the ‘Abrahamic revolution’, discerning commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the light of mimetic theory. The third pathway,  Chauvet, When the Theologian Turns Anthropologist, p. 159. Girard, Interview with Giulio Meotti, in “René Girard’s Accusation. Intellectuals are the Castrators of Meaning”, Modern Age, 50/2 (2008), pp. 180–5, at p. 184. 36

37 René

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within the domain of mainstream theological anthropology, has expanded the discussion, insofar as it seeks to triangulate Christian and Islamic accounts of the humanum with the secular imaginary grounded on evolutionary biology. A Common Word asserts fidelity to the one true God and to the Two Greatest Commandments as the basis for common ground, and for a reading together of the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. Girard has argued for what he sees as the inner logic of the Decalogue.38 The Ten Commandments, singularly and collectively, are intended as restraints on mimetic desire: there is an inner connection between the ‘wandering eye’ which strays after alien gods, and after our neighbour’s goods. This re-ordering of desire also means a renunciation of the conflicts and persecutions which arise from disordered or mis-directed desire. It is synonymous with a rejection of idolatry and is at the heart of the monotheistic ‘Abrahamic revolution’. But the history of Muslim-Christian interaction is not a simple binary; it must be understood in the context of a secular scientific modernity, which the monotheist faiths have often experienced as profoundly ‘other’. Howard, as we have noted, identifies four ‘founding moments’ of Muslim encounter with western thought. Implicit in this scheme is a mimetic insight. As with the political ‘mimetic history of Islam’ which Thomas Scheffler calls for, so a ‘mimetic history’ of ideas – such as the anthropological imaginary in Islam – will be a chronicle of insights, either shared or jealously defended; generated by a reasoned search for truth and wisdom, but also by the resentful and resented displacements and projections of asymmetrical power.39 We have noted above that Christian theology sees in humanity’s being made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ a static and a dynamic dimension respectively: human nature is both a gift and a task. Nor does Qur’anic theological anthropology offer a monological or static description of human beings as they ‘stand before God’. And yet there seems to remain an irreducible difference in perspective. The Judaeo-Christian witness – certainly as understood by mimetic theory – presents us with a dramatic narrative of becoming, with twists and discoveries. In Greek drama we speak of anagnorisis, the moment in a plot or story when the identity of one of the characters or the true nature of a situation, is made manifest, thus enabling a resolution of the story. The insight is inseparable from the journey of discovery. Girard speaks of secular and religious ‘conversion’. The Old Testament theologian, Walter Brueggemann, distinguishes biblical texts which are ‘within the fray’ from those which are ‘above the fray’.40  René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Scheffler, “Islam and Islamism in the Mirror of Girard’s Mimetic Theory”, in Mimetic Theory and Islam, ed. Kirwan and Achtar, pp. 129–40. 40  Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I. Structure Legitimation” and “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II. Embrace of Pain”, Old Testament Theology. Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text, ed. P. D. Miller, Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 1–21 and 22–44. 38

39 Thomas

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The terms apply to books of the Bible at different stages of composition: these can be read socio-historically, in the process of their formation, or as part of the finished canon. But the contrast suggests a broader categorisation, which perhaps distinguishes the Bible as a whole from the Qur’an. The Qur’anic treatment of the Abrahamic and the Joseph narratives, as we have seen, differs from the Biblical, insofar as the human, psycho-social, ‘dramatic’ element in these stories has been evacuated. The effect is to emphasise God’s control of events and celebrate God’s beneficent, merciful purposes. The Biblical tradition invites us to enter into the turmoil and drama of these stories and their characters. Indeed, within the western philosophical and literary tradition, Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard (on Abraham), and Thomas Mann (on Joseph), have done precisely this. By contrast, the Qur’anic witness shows much less interest in these human struggles. It is, in all important respects, ‘above the fray’. Neither perspective is wrong; both are important. But the contrast, if it is such, may determine the parameters of any genuinely ‘common word among us’.

Bibliography Achtar, Ahmad, “Adam and Eve in the Qur’an. A Mimetic Perspective”, Mimetic Theory and Islam. “The Wound Where Light Enters”, ed. Michael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 39–46. Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Paul Gifford (eds.), How We Became Human, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015. Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Paul Gifford (eds.), Can We Survive Our Origins?, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015. Astell, Ann W., and Sandor Goodhart (eds.), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution. Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity, Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. A Common Word Between Us and You, 2012 [Fifth Anniversary edition], MABDA English Monograph Series 20: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. http://www. acommonword.com (accessed 27 February 2018). Brueggemann, Walter, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I. Structure Legitimation”, and “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II. Embrace of Pain”, Old Testament Theology. Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text, ed. P. D. Miller, Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 1–44. Chantre, Benoit, “The Messianic Moment. Bergson and Girard”, Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schink, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, pp. 87–110. Chardin, Teilhard de, The Phenomenon of Man, New York NY: Harper Perennial, 1976 [1959]. Chauvet, Louis-Marie, “When the Theologian Turns Anthropologist”, Keeping Faith in Practice. Aspects of Catholic Pastoral Theology, ed. John Sweeney et al., London: SCM Press, 2010, pp. 148–62 [French original: “Quand le theologien se fait anthropologue”,

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Approches scientifiques des faits religieux, ed. Jean Joncheray, Paris: Beuchesne, 1997, pp. 29–46]. Dumouchel, Paul, “An Essay on Hominization. Current Themes, Girardian-Darwinian Approaches”, The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, ed. James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 13–8. Ericksen, Adam, “Tawhid. The Oneness of God and the Desire for the Good”, Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schink, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, pp. 401–12. Girard, René, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, London: Athlone Press, 1987. Girard, René, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Hamerton-Kelly, Robert, Sacred Violence. Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992. Howard, Damian, Being Human in Islam. The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview, London: Routledge, 2011. Jaspers, Karl, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Jensen, Jeppe S., “Towards Contemporary Islamic Concepts of the Person”, Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought, ed. H. G. Kippenberg et al., Berlin: Monton de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 177–216. Lohlker, Rüdiger, “Islam. Law and Violence (and Non-Violence)”, Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schink, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, pp. 413–26. Meotti, Giulio, “René Girard’s Accusation. Intellectuals are the Castrators of Meaning”, Modern Age 50/2 (2008), pp. 180–5. Palaver, Wolfgang, “The Abrahamic Revolution”, Mimetic Theory and World Religions, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schink, East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, pp. 259–78. Rahner, Karl, Hominisation. The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem, London: Burns and Oates, 1965. Sejdini, Zekirija, “Islamic Anthropology, based on Key Passages in the Qur’an”, Mimetic Theory and Islam. “The Wound Where Light Enters”, ed. Michael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 31–8. Shah-Kazemi, Reza, “Jesus in the Qur’an. Selfhood and Compassion. An Akbari Perspective”, Sufism. Love & Wisdom, ed. J.-L. Michon and R. Gaetani, Bloomington IN: World Wisdom, 2006, pp. 217–35. Scheffler, Thomas, “Islam and Islamism in the Mirror of Girard’s Mimetic Theory”, Mimetic Theory and Islam. “The Wound Where Light Enters”, ed. Michael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 129–40. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Williams, Rowan, “Foreword”, Mimesis and Atonement. René Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation, ed. Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden, New York NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. xiii–xv. Tim Winter,“ ‘Nations like Yourselves’. Some Muslim Debates over Qur’an 6:38”, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 163–72.

Contributors Ahmad Achtar is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Muslim College London (UK). He undertook his first degree at the University of Aleppo (Syria), gaining a BSc in physics, and has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of University of London specialising in Qur’anic Studies. Between 2005 and 2007 he worked as an academic advisor for the Islamic Studies programme at Birkbeck London University. He is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, London and a member of British Association of Islamic Studies (BRAIS). He is also involved in Scriptural Reasoning practice and is a member of SR University Group, Cambridge. Currently he is working on two books: Approaches to Anthropomorphism in the Qur’ān and Theory of Figurative Language (majāz) in Arabic/Islamic Thought. Alexei Bodrov is founder and rector of St Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute in Moscow and a researcher at the faculty of religion and theology of the Free University, Amsterdam. He is editor-in-chief of St Andrew’s Institute Press and editor of an academic quarterly Pages. Theology, Culture, Education (Moscow). He is co-editor of Theology and the Political. Theo-political Reflections on Contemporary Politics in Ecumenical Conversation (Brill, 2020) and a number of books in Russian including the Russian editions of History of Vatican II (5 Vols.) and Handbuch christlich-islamischer Dialog; a member of the editorial boards of the book series Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture and Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory and journals Contagion (Michigan) and Religionen unterwegs (Vienna). He is a founding Board member of the European Christian Convention and a member of the Network of Institutions of Higher Ecumenical Theological Education (WCC), Working Groups for the Global Ecumenical Theological Institutes (GETI) and the Thematic Group on Science, Technologies and Christian Ethics (CEC). Conor Cunningham is Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy. He studied Law at the University of Kent and obtained his MPhil in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. On completing his Diploma in Theology at the University of Cambridge, he was awarded a British Academy Studentship to study for a PhD. He was then awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Nottingham, where he set up the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. He was

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then offered a lectureship in theology. In 2009, he wrote and presented the multi award-winning BBC documentary  – ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ In 2012–13, he was a Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, where he worked in a team of 12, composed of mainly atheist scientists, a philosopher and three theologians on the question of ‘Evolution and Human Nature’. Whilst in Princeton, he was ‘theologian in residence’ in 2013 at Princeton Theological Seminary. Lejla Demiri is Professor of Islamic Doctrine at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2008), and held post-doctoral fellowships at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (2007–10) and the Free University of Berlin (2010–12). Her research explores systematic theology, the intellectual history of Islam and Muslim-Christian theological encounters, and she publishes extensively on theological and interfaith matters. She is the author of Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Medieval Cairo (Brill, 2013), and co-editor of The Future of Interfaith Dialogue (with Yazid Said; CUP, 2018) and Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology (with Samuela Pagani; Mohr Siebeck, 2019). She also serves as Section Editor for Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History (1500–1900) (Brill, 2012–present), and Senior Editor (Islam) of St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (2019–present). Paul-A. Hardy was an independent scholar educated in the University of Oxford (BA/MA) in Oriental Studies specializing in Hebrew, Aramaic & Syriac. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago under Fazlur Rahman and Hossein Ziai. He taught at the School of Oriental & African Studies, Hunter College and Rutgers University. He is the author of Divine Naming in Christianity and Islam. A Philosophical Study on Nominal Reference (forthcoming). The editors regret to note his death on 6 April 2022. Michael Kirwan SJ is a Jesuit priest of the British province, who is teaching and researching in Catholic theology at the Loyola Institute, in Trinity College, Dublin. His doctoral thesis was entitled Theologies of Martyrdom in the Light of René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. He has written Discovering Girard (DLT, 2004), Political Theology. A New Introduction (DLT, 2008), and Girard and Theology (T&T Clark, 2009), and he is the co-editor, with Ahmad Achtar, of Mimetic Theory and Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). His other research interests include political theology, and the interdisciplinary conversation between theology and literature. Daniel A. Madigan SJ is an Australian Jesuit priest who joined Georgetown’s Department of Theology in 2008 and is directing the doctoral program in Religious Pluralism. He holds the title of Jeanette J. and Otto J. Ruesch Family Distinguished Jesuit Scholar. Since 2012 he has been Chair of the Building Bridges

Contributors

259

Seminar  – an annual gathering of Muslim and Christian scholars now in its nineteenth year. Before moving to Georgetown, he taught in Rome (2000–07), where he was the founder and director (2002–07) of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Simone Dario Nardella is pursuing a joint PhD between the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria (Dottorato in Politica, Cultura e Sviluppo) and the Centre for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen (ThD in Islamic Theology). His BA was in Arabic and Islamic Studies (SOAS, London) and his MA in Civilization Studies (Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University, Istanbul). He specializes in Sufi epistemology and ontology and is currently working on ʿAbd al-Ghānī al-Nābulusī’s commentary, Kashf al-sirr al-ghāmiḍ, on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dīwān. Amina Nawaz is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen. She completed her PhD in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2015 with a doctoral dissertation which examined the sixteenth-century devotional writings of Morisco communities in Spain. Her research focuses on the ways in which Muslims have historically engaged with law and theology in their written works. Her monograph project examines the legal and theological aspects of Morisco devotional works as case studies by which to reconsider current perceptions of Muslims in ‘minority’ contexts. Ivana Noble is Professor of Ecumenical Theology at Charles University in Prague and currently director of the Ecumenical Institute at its Protestant Faculty. She is a priest in the Hussite Church, and a former president of Societas Oecumenica. She is author of Accounts of Hope (2001); Tracing God (Czech 2004; English 2010); Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context (2010); and co-author of Ways of Orthodox Theology to the West in the 20th Century (Czech 2012; English 2015; Russian 2016); Wrestling with the Mind of the Fathers in (Post)Modern Orthodox Theology (2015); and The Many Voices of the 20th Century Orthodox Theology in the West (Czech 2016); Essays in Ecumenical Theology I. Aims, Methods, Themes and Contexts (2019). Friedrich Schweitzer (Dr. rer.soc. theol. habil., Tübingen University, Dr. theol. h.c., University of Helsinki, Th.M., Harvard University) is Professor of Practical Theology/Religious Education at the University of Tübingen. He specialises in questions of the relationship between theology and education (Bildung) and of religious education and moral education. Some of his recent major research projects concern confirmation work in Europe (a comparative study in nine European countries), interreligious education (especially between

260

Contributors

Christians and Muslims) as well as vocation-oriented religious education. He has served as President of the International Academy of Practical Theology, Chairman of the Academic Society of Theology and the Education chamber of the Protestant Church in Germany. One of his latest books is on The Future of Protestant Religious Education in an Age of Globalization (Waxmann, 2018; together with Hyun-Sook Kim and Richard Osmer). He was awarded an honorary doctoral degree in Theology from the University of Helsinki in 2017. Christoph Schwöbel studied theology and philosophy at the Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel and at the University of Marburg where he was also awarded the degree of Dr. theol. (1978) and passed his Habilitation (1990). From 1986 to 1993 he was Lecturer in Systematic Theology at King’s College London, University of London, where he founded the Research Institute in Systematic Theology. He held chairs in the University of Kiel (1993–99) and the University of Heidelberg (1999–2004) where he was also the Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies. From 2004 to 2018 he held the Chair in Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Tübingen. From 2018 to 2021 he was 1643 Chair of Divinity in the University of St Andrews. Among his books are: God, Action and Revelation (Kok Pharos, 1992), Gott in Beziehung (Mohr Siebeck, 2002, 2nd ed. 2021), Christlicher Glaube im Pluralismus (Mohr Siebeck, 2003) and Gott im Gespräch (Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Together with Susanne Heine, Ömer Öszoy and Abdullah Takim he edited Christen und Muslime im Gespräch. Eine Verständigung über theologische Kernthemen (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2014). The editors regret to note his death on 18 September 2021. Recep ŞENTÜRK is Professor of Sociology at Ibn Khaldun University (IHU) in Istanbul, Turkey. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, Department of Sociology, and specialises in civilization studies, sociology and Islamic studies with a focus on social networks, human rights, and modernisation in the Muslim world. Among his books are (in English), Narrative Social Structure. Hadith Transmission Network 610–1505 (Stanford University Press, 2005), and (in Turkish) Open Civilization. Towards a Multi-Civilizational Society and World (İz Yayıncılık, 2017); Ibn Khaldun. Contemporary Readings (İz Yayıncılık, 2009); Malcolm X. Struggle for Human Rights (İlke Yayıncılık, 2006); Social Memory. Hadith Transmission Network 610–1505 (İz Yayıncılık, 2018). Recep Şentürk’s works have been translated into Arabic, Japanese and Spanish. Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino is Professor of Hadith Studies and Prophetic Tradition at the Center for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen (since 2016). He obtained his PhD at the University of Aix-Marseille (France) in 2012 and published Fès et sainteté in 2014, a study of the history of sainthood in

Contributors

261

the city of Fez, Morocco. He specialises in the transmission and interpretation of Hadith, in classical and modern Islamic prophetology and in the history of Islamic spirituality. He is currently involved in the Franco-German research project “The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Modern Islam (ANRDFG)” and works on al-Shifā bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣtafā (‘The Healing through the Recognition of the Rights of the Chosen Prophet’) of al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149) in order to examine the theological significance of the believer’s relationship with the Prophet Muhammad in classical Sunni thought. Tim Winter is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and is Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College. He is a regular contributor to the British press and BBC Radio. He has translated several sections of the Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī (d. 505/1111), authored numerous academic articles on Islamic thought, history and interfaith. He is also known for his works dealing with contemporary issues of Islamic culture, identity and spirituality. Winter is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (CUP, 2008) and together with Richard Harries and Norman Solomon, is co-editor of Abraham’s Children. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation (T&T Clark, 2006). His most recent book is Travelling Home. Essays on Islam in Europe (Quilliam Press, 2020). Recognised as a leading figure in Muslim interfaith relations, Winter was a major signatory of A Common Word (2007). R alf K. Wüstenberg is Professor of Systematic Theology at Europa-University Flensburg and Head of the Department for Dialogue of Religion. After studying Theology in Berlin, Cambridge and Heidelberg, Wüstenberg graduated from Humboldt-University Berlin (Dr. theol.) and Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg (Habilitation). He was Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York and in the University of Cape Town. He is Senior Research Associate at St. Edmund’s College in the University of Cambridge and guest preacher in the Lutheran Church at Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom). His publications include the English titles Islam as Devotion (Fortress Academic, 2019); Christology. How do we talk about Jesus Christ today? (Cascade Books, 2014), The Political Dimension of Reconciliation in South Africa and Germany (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2009), Theology in Dialogue. The Impact of Arts, Humanities and Science on Contemporary Religious Discourse (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), and A Theology of Life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998). Mujadad Zaman is Research Associate at the Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen. His research focuses on intellectual history with particular reference to the philosophy of education. His work is divided between a concentration on medieval systems of education in Christian Europe and Islamic civilization, as well as the twenty-first century intellectual cultures of the univer-

262

Contributors

sity and disciplinary imagination. He is co-editor of the Philosophies of Islamic Education. Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses (Routledge, 2016).

Index A Common Word ​5, 248, 249, 253, 254 Abel ​63, 175 Abraham ​3, 143, 96fn43, 98fn46, 143, 207, 249, 255 Abrahamic ​1, 3, 18, 26, 35, 68, 140, 153, 154, 198, 199, 221, 247–250, 254, 255 adab ​145fn34, 150, 152 Adam ​1, 7–10, 13, 14, 18, 28, 57fn9, 62–64, 70, 88–91, 94, 139, 148fn50, 162, 164, 166–171, 173–175, 180, 181, 185, 188, 199, 207, 244–246, 253 Adams, Charles ​164, 165 Akbarian ​74 Akedah / binding of Isaac ​3, 249 ʿālam al-amr / world of Divine command ​ 46fn32 Albert the Great ​229, 230 ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib ​150 Almonacid de la Sierra ​105 amāna ​91 Ambrose ​60fn21 amr wujūdī ​74 Anas ibn Malik ​142 Andalusia ​70, 193 Anselm of Canterbury ​26fn3, 175, 176 Aristotelian ​29, 32, 33, 199, 209, 225, 234 Aristotelianism ​225 Aristotle ​27, 28, 206, 210–212, 224, 226–229, 231, 232, 234 Ashʿarī ​40fn7, 184fn18, 200fn25, 201fn28 Athanasius ​58fn14, 59fn18 athariyya  ​194 atonement ​9, 16, 161–164, 174–177 Augustine ​7, 9, 10, 12, 27fn7, 60fn21, 235, 236 Austin, John Longshaw ​205, 206 authenticity  ​2, 4, 8 Averroes / Ibn Rushd ​209, 210

Avicenna / Ibn Sīnā ​32, 33, 40fn7, 44fn22, 209 axial culture ​68 ʿayn al-baṣīra  ​78 baqāʾ ​77 bashar ​88 bashariyya  ​88 bāṭil ​92, 93 Bāʿūniyya, ʿĀʾisha al- ​78 beatific vision ​18, 234–237 behaviourism ​39fn2 Bergson, Henri ​251 Bint al-Nafīs, Sitt ʿAjam ​78 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich ​125 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich ​87, 177 Bryson ​146, 147 Bush, George ​55 Cain ​63, 171 Calvin, John ​7, 16, 165, 180, 183, 185–188 Cartesian philosophy ​39fn2 Cassian, John ​60 Certeau, Michel de ​212 Chalcedon ​231 Chardin, Teilhard de ​251 cheap grace ​177 Children  ​5, 15, 42, 62, 63fn32, 89, 96, 123–135, 139–151, 153, 154, 199 Church Fathers ​56, 57, 59, 60, 63 Clement of Alexandria ​60fn21 cognitivism ​39fn2 Convention on Children’s Rights ​134 Corbin, Henry ​79fn45, 216–218 Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam ​134 Dabbāgh, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al- ​139fn6, 148 dāʾirat al-wujūd ​77

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Index

Damascus ​78 daʿwah  ​162 dawāʾir ​71 death ​13, 16, 29, 30, 31fn26, 40, 59fn17, 63, 64, 67–80, 107, 141, 143fn25, 161, 162, 165, 167, 174–176, 201, 221, 225, 232–234, 236, 253 Decalogue / Ten Commandments ​254 Descartes, René  ​39 Deus revelans legem ​91fn22 dhikr  ​4, 71, 75, 77, 204fn1 Dhū l-Nūn ​77 Dionysius ​58fn14, 225 docetism ​234 dualism ​17, 39, 40, 60, 221, 222, 225, 234 Durkheim, Émile ​246 Ecclesiam suam  5​ 5fn2 Eden ​7, 63, 80, 180fn2, 246 Eliade, Mircea ​68 Elijah ​59fn17 Enoch ​59fn17 Ephesus ​231 epoché ​221, 234, 237 Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı ​40 Eschaton ​80, 233 essence ​3, 40, 41, 46–48, 70, 170, 194, 200fn23, 202, 211, 214, 222, 225, 226, 228–230, 232–236 Eucharist ​8, 15, 133, 231 eudaimonia ​150 Eve ​13, 62–64, 91, 164, 167, 169, 171, 174, 244–246 ex nihilo ​221, 236 ex opera operato ​99fn52 existence ​25, 30, 38, 39, 41, 43fn17, 44, 45, 48, 70, 71, 73–76, 79, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93–95, 97, 98, 100–102, 127, 128, 135, 148, 164, 166, 193–195, 196fn12, 197, 200fn23, 201, 213, 225, 230, 233, 235 expiation ​161 Falāḥ ​161 Fall, the ​1, 7–10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 28–30, 59, 62, 63fn33, 154, 162, 165, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 244 falsafa ​ 40, 194

fanāʾ / annihilation ​17, 67, 77, 197, 198 Fārābī, Abū Naṣr al- ​32, 40fn7, 209 Faruqi, Ismail Raji al- ​15, 16, 161, 162, 164, 165, 176, 177 Fāṭima ​15, 142, 143 fiṭra ​ 8, 15, 109, 146, 148, 151, 152, 172, 174 Flitner, Andreas ​125 forgiveness ​16, 162, 168, 171, 173, 174, 180–184, 186, 203, 250 Frege, Gottlob ​204fn2, 205, 212, 215, 217 Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, al- ​73 Gage, Phineas ​222, 224 Gavison, Abraham ​73 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child ​134 Geniza ​73, 114fn23 Germany ​123, 130, 133, 134 ghayb, al- ​148 Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al- ​12, 13, 15, 16, 28fn17, 31fn26, 32–36, 38, 40, 42–44, 46–48, 49fn41, 51, 67, 70, 72–76, 78, 79, 113, 115, 143, 148, 151, 152fn66, 183–189, 211, 212 Gilʿadi, Avner ​130, 145, 153 Girard, René ​18, 19, 243, 245–249, 251–254 Granada ​106 Gregory of Nazianzus ​58fn14 Gregory of Nyssa ​56–58, 213, 226 habitus ​243, 253 Hādī, al- ​94 ḥāl ​ 99, 201 Halevi, Judah ​12, 28fn17, 31fn26, 33–36 Ḥallāj ​194 hamartia ​18, 247 ḥaqīqa ilāhiyya ​73 f. Ḥaqq, al- ​92, 193–196, 198, 200, 201 harpagmon ​169fn21 hawā ​92, 93, 101 ḥayāt al-dunyā ​93 heart / qalb  ​1, 9, 12, 31, 35, 41–51, 63, 75, 76, 109, 138, 182, 187, 189, 208, 213, 230 Heidegger, Martin ​1, 2, 17, 204, 206, 214–218

Index

Heraclitus ​225 hermeneutic of violence ​247, 248 hesychasm ​213 Hippocrates ​143, 144 hominisation ​251 ḥulūl / incarnationism ​194 humanity / humankind / mankind ​1, 4, 6–9, 12–14, 18, 19, 28, 34, 55–62, 64, 69, 75, 79, 87, 88, 89fn13, 90, 91, 94, 96fn42, 138, 139, 147, 152fn66, 161, 163–165, 167, 168, 170–172, 174–178, 180, 185fn27, 188, 231, 237, 243–245, 252–254 humanum ​ 244, 245, 250, 254 Husserl, Edmund ​204fn2, 217fn41 Iblīs ​88–90, 93, 102fn59, 168, 169, 171, 180 Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn ​6, 11, 16, 17, 73, 74, 77, 78, 115, 149fn53, 193–195, 209, 210, 213 Ibn Barrajān, Abū l-Ḥakam ​70, 71 Ibn Miskawayh, Abū ʿAlī ​147 Ibn Qufl ​149 Ibn Ṭufayl, Abū Bakr ​147 icon ​6, 17, 56, 65, 212, 213 Ignatius of Antioch ​215 ʿilm ​90, 92, 201 imitatio ​5, 14, 100fn55, 114, 115 imputatio ​169fn22, 186 incarnation ​132, 133, 174, 176, 226, 236 insān al-kāmil, al-  ​11, 102, 147 inshāʾ ​70 intiqāl ​74 Iqbal, Muhammad ​4, 148 irādat al-ʿaql / will of reason ​42 irādat al-shahwa / will of desires ​42 Irenaeus of Lyon ​13, 61fn22, 62–64, 233 Istanbul ​76 istikbār ​168 iʿtibār ​71, 197 ittibāʿ (al-Nabī) ​86, 87, 97–102, 142 ittibāʿ al-hudā ​91, 93, 94 ittiḥād / unification ​194 iustitia aliena  ​186 Jacob’s Ladder / Sulam Yaakov ​226 jāhiliyya ​94

265

jasad al-ẓāhir, al- ​78 Jaspers, Karl ​248 Jawziyya, Ibn Qayyim al- ​144 Jesus Christ ​5, 6, 16, 29, 59, 85, 99fn52, 115, 128–130, 161, 162, 165, 169fn21, 174–177, 183, 186, 204fn1, 207, 213, 237, 250, 253 Jews / Jewish / Judaism ​1, 3, 5–7, 9, 10, 12, 26, 27, 33, 55, 57–59, 60fn21, 73, 88, 91fn22, 106, 113, 114fn23, 131, 140fn11, 221fn1, 226, 247, 253 jihad / jihād  ​50, 173, 250 Jinn ​180, 202 John Damascene ​58fn14, 231 Joseph / Yūsuf ​18, 49, 173, 249, 255 Jung, Carl ​138 justification ​127, 186, 244 kalām ​11, 194, 200fn25, 201 Kant, Immanuel ​255 Katip Çelebi / Ḥājjī Khalīfa ​45 Khalīfa / vicegerent ​8, 87, 89, 162, 166, 171, 199, 245 Khiḍr ​141 khilāfa ​85fn4 khuṭuwāt al-shayṭān ​92 Kierkegaard, Søren ​255 Kindī, Abū Yaʿqūb ibn Ishāq al- ​75, 79 Korcak, Janusz ​126 Kubrā, Najm al-Dīn ​212, 213 kufr ​ 168 Langeveld, Martinus ​125 Law and Gospel ​184, 187 Lazarus ​235, 237 Levinas, Emmanuel ​57, 58 Lumen gentium ​55fn2 lumen naturale ​215 Luqmān ​141 Luther, Martin ​12, 27–32, 34–36, 127, 128, 180, 185, 189, 216, 217 Lyons, John ​205 maʿād ​68 magis ac magis ​186 majārī ḥikmat Allāh ​71 Mann, Thomas ​249, 255

266

Index

maʿrifa ​45, 71, 77, 80 Mary ​63, 148 materialism ​38, 225, 232 Matūrīdī (school of thought) ​40fn7, 200fn25 Māturīdī, Abū Manṣūr al- ​151 Maududi, Sayed Abul Aʿla ​170 Maximus the Confessor ​58fn14, 62 Mediterranean ​106, 113 Meister Eckhart ​210–212, 214–216 mind-body problem ​39 monotheism ​1–3, 6, 18, 68, 96fn43, 151, 153, 198, 245, 250, 254 Morisco ​105–108, 110, 111fn18, 112, 113, 115, 116 Moses ​5, 59fn17, 141, 206 Muhammad ​5, 12, 70, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94–102, 105, 109–112, 141, 145, 167, 172, 186 muḥarrar ​148 mujāhadat al-nafs ​173 mulk ​168fn20, 169 Mulla Sadra ​40fn7 muṣawwirūn ​166 mutawakkil ​148 Muʿtazila ​33 Nābulusī, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al- ​16, 17, 74–76, 79, 193–200 nafs ​2, 42fn14, 46, 171, 173, 200, 218 nafs / animal self ​40, 44 nafs al-ammāra, al- / the ruling appetitive self  ​41, 49, 173 nafs al-lawwāma, al- / the critical self ​41, 49, 50, 173 nafs al-mutmaʾinna, al- / the content self ​ 41, 49, 50, 68, 173 nafs al-nāṭiqa, al- / rational soul ​41 nafs al-shahwāniyya, al- / appetitive self ​ 48 narrative anthropology ​86, 87 nashʾa al-ākhira, al- ​69 nashʾa al-ūlā, al- ​70 Nazareth ​183fn10, 186, 207, 237 Nicene Creed ​175 niʿma ​79 Noah ​57fn9, 57fn10, 63 nomina divina ​204, 213, 216, 217

Oedipus ​249 Origen ​60fn21, 64fn43 Sin / Original Sin ​1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 29, 31, 140, 161–172, 174–178, 180–183, 185, 187–189, 232, 233, 244fn3 Orvieto ​231 Paideia ​145fn34, 152 Panikkar, Raimundo ​6, 215 Paul ​3, 10, 12, 30, 31, 58fn14, 169fn21, 182, 211, 217, 221fn1, 244 Paul, Jean ​128 Pharaoh ​168 Plato ​39fn2, 57fn8, 221fn1, 225, 227, 232, 237, 238fn70 Platonic ​17, 147fn40, 225, 227 Platonism ​60, 224 plenitudo animae ​223 Plotinus ​211, 236 Pope Benedict XVI ​248 Pope Paul VI ​55fn2 Potamius of Lisbon ​57 Priesterbetrugstheorie ​86 prime cause ​33 pro me ​186 pro nobis ​186 Proclus ​226 Prophetology ​11, 70, 86–88 Qāshānī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al- ​41 Qayrawānī, Ibn al-Jazzār al- ​144 Qūnawī, Ṣadr al-Dīn al- ​77fn37 Qurṭubī, Abū ʿAbdullāh al- ​75 Qushayrī, Abū l-Qāsim al- ​98fn46, 148 Rahner, Karl ​9, 15, 163, 167, 169, 251 rational animal ​199, 227 Ratzinger, Joseph ​227 Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn al- ​75fn27 reconciliation ​173, 174, 183, 249, 250 redemption ​7, 10, 59fn18, 161–165, 175, 233 Regensburg ​248 repentance ​7, 13, 16, 59fn18, 63, 76, 143fn23, 168, 174, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 188

Index

resurrection ​1, 13, 18, 31fn26, 32–34, 68–70, 72, 75, 77, 91, 141, 174, 176, 202, 221, 223, 225, 235, 236, 247, 253 Riḍā, Muḥammad Rashīd ​3fn7, 4, 175, 176 rūḥ al-ḥayawānī, al- / animal soul ​ 43fn17, 45 rūḥ al-insānī, al- / human soul ​43fn17 Rumi / Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn ​253 Ryle, Gilbert ​210fn19, 222 Ṣādiq, Jafar al- ​148, 150 salvation ​13, 16, 61, 64, 91, 111, 115, 161–164, 167, 170, 175–177, 182, 183, 200fn25, 223, 231, 244 salvation history ​98 sanctification ​165, 186 Satan ​47–50, 88, 89, 92, 168, 180, 181, 185fn23 satisfaction ​16, 165, 177 Scheffler, Thomas ​254 Schleiermacher, Friedrich ​128, 153fn70 secular modernity ​250 self-interpreting animal ​25 Septuagint ​56, 206 sequela christi ​87 shafāʿa al-ʿuẓmā, al- ​94 Shaykhīzāda ​74 Sorkin, David ​153 soteriological ​7, 89, 101, 186 soteriology ​8, 10, 16, 99fn49, 161, 177, 183 Spain ​14, 105–108, 113, 114, 116 Sraffa, Piero ​214 St Cyril of Alexandria ​231 Suhrawardī ​40fn7 Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn al- ​72, 76, 149fn52 ṭāʿa ​101fn58 tadbīr ​147 taḥqīq al-tawḥīd / the realisation of monotheism ​198

267

taḥqīq al-wujūd / the realisation of Being ​ 198 taklīf  ​89fn14, 102 tamyīz ​144, 148 tanāsukh / metempsychosis ​79 tanazzulāt  ​77 tarbiya ​150, 151 taṣawwuf ​40, 194 Taşköprüzâde ​45 tawḥīd ​110, 213 Taylor, Charles ​25, 250 tazkiya ​78 Thomas Aquinas ​17, 18, 205, 221–232, 234–238 thymos ​147fn40, 149 Tūnisī, Ibn Jamīl al- ​75 Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al- ​146 ʿubūdiyya ​148, 150 un-moved mover ​228 uṣūl al-fiqh ​102 uswa ḥasana ​96 Vatican II ​10, 55fn2, 248 vegetative soul (al-rūḥ al-nabātī) ​43 waḥdat al-wujūd / oneness of being ​194, 195, 198 waḥy / revelation ​17, 30, 31, 34–36, 58, 69, 86, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96fn41, 97, 99fn49, 102, 141, 162, 164, 193, 198, 200fn25, 210, 244, 245, 246 wārith ​67 Werkgerechtigkeit ​91fn22 Williams, Rowan ​246 Wittgenstein, Ludwig ​17, 204, 205, 214 wujūd ​17, 45, 74, 77, 193–196, 198, 200, 201, 208–210, 213 ẓann ​78, 92, 93 Zulaykha ​173 ẓulm al-nafs ​171